I addressed the Chief in the Portuguese language, which I had learned during my stay at Floresta headquarters, and also in Spanish but he only shook his head; all my efforts were useless.  He let me know in a friendly manner that my hammock was to be my resting-place and that I would not be molested.  His tribe was one that occupied an almost unknown region and had no connection with white men or Brazilians or people near the river.  I tried in the course of the mimical conversation to make him understand that, with six companions from a big Chief’s maloca (meaning Coronel da Silva and the Floresta headquarters), I had penetrated into the woods near this mighty Chief’s maloca,—­here I pointed at the Chief—­that the men had died from fever and I was left alone and that luckily, I had found my way to the free men of the forest (here I made a sweeping movement with my hands).  He nodded and the audience was over.  I was led back to my hammock to dream and eat, and dream again.

Although the Chief and his men presented an appearance wholly unknown to me, yet it did not seem to distract me at the first glance, but as my faculties slowly returned to their former activity, I looked at them and found them very strange figures, indeed.  Every man had two feathers inserted in the cartilage of his nose; at some distance it appeared as if they wore moustaches.  Besides this, the Chief had a sort of feather-dress reaching half way down to his knees; this was simply a quantity of mutum feathers tied together as a girdle by means of plant-fibres.  The women wore no clothing whatever, their only ornamentation being the oval wooden piece in the lower lip and fancifully arranged designs on face, arms, and body.  The colours which they preferred were scarlet and black, and they procured these dyes from two plants that grew in the forest near by.  They would squeeze the pulp of the fruits and apply the rich-coloured juice with their fingers, forming one scarlet ring around each eye, outside of this a black and larger ring, and, finally, two scarlet bands reaching from the temples to the chin.

There were probably sixty-five families in this communal hut, all having their little households scattered throughout the place without any separating partitions whatever.  The many poles which supported the roof formed the only way of distinguishing the individual households.  The men strung their hammocks between the poles in such a way that they formed a triangle, and in the middle of this a fire was always going.  Here the women were doing the cooking of game that the men brought in at all times of the day.  The men slept in the hammocks, while the women were treated less cavalierly; they slept with their children on the ground under the hammocks around the little family triangle.  As a rule they had woven mats made of grass-fibre and coloured with the juices of the urucu plant and the genipapa, but in many instances they had skins of jaguars, and, which was more frequent, the furs of the three-toed sloths.  These were placed around the family fire, directly under the hammocks occupied by the men.  In these hammocks the men did most of the repair work on their bows and arrows when necessary, here they fitted the arrow heads to the shafts, in fact, they spent all their time in them when not actually hunting in the forests.