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The name of Amalivaca is spread over a region of more than five thousand square leagues; he is found designated as the father of mankind, or our great grandfather, as far as to the Caribbee nations, whose idiom approaches the Tamanac only in the same degree as the German approaches the Greek, the Persian, and the Sanscrit.
"It seems that they have a very great respect for white men except Spaniards and are ever on the lookout for a paleface named Amalivaca to come across the Great Water and unite all the Indians into one great and powerful nation which shall utterly destroy the Spaniards and restore the country to its original owners."
They hoped by this means to spare men trouble in navigating rivers; but, however great the power of these regenerators of the world, they could never contrive to give a double slope to the Orinoco, and were compelled to relinquish this singular plan. Amalivaca had daughters, who had a decided taste for travelling.
These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two human beings saved on the summit of a mountain, and casting behind them the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the earth; of that national divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, who prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief, are well worthy of attention.
The tradition states, doubtless with a figurative meaning, that he broke their legs, to render them sedentary, and force them to people the land of the Tamanacs. After having regulated everything in America, on that side of the great water, Amalivaca again embarked, and returned to the other shore, to the same place from whence he came.
They killed the creature, not because they required it for food, but because Phil was of opinion that its carcass might serve as a bait for the enticement of the monster out of the pool, thus enabling them to get a fair shot at him; and having dragged the dead animal to the mouth of the cave, they next proceeded to examine at leisure the sculptured face of the rocks, which Vilcamapata at once unhesitatingly pronounced to be the work of Amalivaca, the wonderful being whom the Indians were looking for from across the Great Water to deliver them from the power of the hated Spaniard, and restore to them the undisputed possession of their own country.
The natives show also a large stone near this cavern, in the plains of Maita, which they say was an instrument of music, the drum of Amalivaca. We must here observe, that this heroic personage had a brother, Vochi, who helped him to give the surface of the earth its present form.
Amalivaca was a stranger, like Manco-Capac, Bochica, and Quetzalcohuatl; those extraordinary men, who, in the alpine or civilized part of America, on the tablelands of Peru, New Grenada, and Anahuac, organized civil society, regulated the order of sacrifices, and founded religious congregations.
Since the natives have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine that Europe is this other shore; and one of them inquired with great simplicity of Father Gili, whether he had there seen the great Amalivaca, the father of the Tamanacs, who had covered the rocks with symbolic figures.
However, being accustomed to get his bread by his impudence, he soon recovered himself, advanced, smote one of the musicians over the head with his rattle to procure silence; and then began a harangue, to which Amyas listened patiently, cigar in mouth. "What's it all about, boy?" "He wants to know whether you have seen Amalivaca on the other shore of the great water?"
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