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In the ordinary Igorot shield the horns are flat, merely prolonging the surface of the shield, or else presenting only a very small relief. As usual, a lacing of bejuco across top and bottom protects the shield against a separation in the event of an unlucky stroke splitting it in two. We found the town unusually clean.
Of course I knew in a way, I had seen the 'bejuco' poles, and the rattans, and the whipping bench, and sometimes, of a Sunday, when I was in the village and could not go away, I had heard cries from the tribunal such as white men do not often hear such as I hope no one will ever hear again, even from those places. "Pedro was my Visayan servant, a good worker and a likable fellow in every way.
They were pieces of a lliana, or creeping plant. It was the bejuco de curare, or "mavacure," as it is sometimes called. The leaves he had stripped off, and left behind as useless. Had he brought them with him, they would have been seen to be small leaves of an oblong-oval shape, sharp at the points, and of a whitish-green colour. Don Pablo knew the plant to be a species of Strychnos.
They were pieces of a lliana, or creeping plant. It was the bejuco de curare, or "mavacure," as it is sometimes called. The leaves he had stripped off, and left behind as useless. Had he brought them with him, they would have been seen to be small leaves of an oblong-oval shape, sharp at the points, and of a whittish-green colour. Don Pablo knew the plant to be a species of Strychnos.
Let this sacrifice appease your wrath and take from us our misfortunes, granting us better times. "After this, the boy Sacum was brought forward by Ongon, placed against a small tree about six feet high, his hands tied above his head, and his body tied to the tree with bejuco strips at the waist and knees.
Then, if he tried to escape, or refused to come with them, one of the 'bejuco' 'man-catchers' was swung with a practiced hand in his direction, and, caught in a hundred places by its cruel, thorny hooks, he was led to town, the journey in itself being a torture such as few men would think they could endure. The whipping came later.
An interesting chemical and physiological investigation remains to be accomplished in Europe on the poisons of the New World, when, by more frequent communications, the curare de bejuco, the curare de raiz, and the various poisons of the Amazon, Guallaga, and Brazil, can be procured, without being confounded together, from the places where they are prepared.
Some of them are rather attractively decorated with brass and copper studs, and a few have red and yellow bejuco ferrules near the blade. In some pueblos of the Bontoc area, as at Mayinit, spear shafts are worked down and eventually smoothed and finished by a flexible, bamboo knife-blade machine.
It is curved slightly and is about two feet long, and is held in one hand suspended by a bejuco string so that the vibrations are not interfered with. It is beaten with a drum-stick, as is also the shield. The gansa, or brass gong, the usual musical instrument of the Ifugaos, is never used in the funeral of a beheaded man. The two men who headed each procession carried two spears each.
Still farther north is the Kalinga shield a slim, gracefully formed shield, differing from the typical Bontoc weapon chiefly in its more graceful outline. It is of a uniform black color and has the bejuco lacings the same as the others.
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