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I felt I could not attend to it, and have my tea afterwards, so I directed one of the canoe-shaped little tubs, used for beating up the manioc in, to be brought and filled with hot water, and then putting into it a heavy dose of Condy's fluid, I made her sit down and lay the whole arm in it, and went and had my tea.
The children are accordingly instructed in such pursuits as shall be the means of earning a livelihood in future years: some are taught a trade, others are employed in the cultivation of gardens, and subsequently in the preparation of a variety of produce. Among others, the preparation of tapioca from the root of the manioc has recently been attended with great success.
To our first message, offering a visit of explanation to Manenko, we got an answer, with a basket of manioc roots, that we must remain where we were till she should visit us. Having waited two days already for her, other messengers arrived with orders for me to come to her. We had heavy rains almost every day; indeed, the rainy season had fairly set in.
At Luque, a village where the passengers stop for refreshments, the women of the place flock at the windows and offer for sale embroideries of their own invention worked on tulle or on a special kind of netting, while the venders of lunches appear, not with the traditional fried oysters, fried chickens or sandwiches of our own favored land, but with bottles of fresh milk and chiapa, a kind of bread made from manioc, among the ingredients of which are starch and eggs, and for which Luque is famous.
The principal food of the negroes is a sort of thick paste called Manioc, which is prepared from Tapioca by kneading in hot water; to an European palate it has a disagreeable flavour, but may be nutritious, as the slaves mostly look well-fed; I doubt, however, its being wholesome without a mixture of other food, and I even think it possible that it may be the original cause of a terrible disease to which the negroes alone are subject, and of which they know nothing in their own country.
Some had got broken basins or pumpkin-gourds before them, in which they kneaded up with their hands boiled beans and manioc flour; this thick and disgusting- looking mess they devoured with avidity. Others were eating pieces of meat, which they likewise tore with their hands, and threw into their mouths alternately with handfuls of manioc flour.
Not only many new varieties of rice have been introduced, and are now being introduced, adapted to opposite extremes of weather: and soil some to the low grounds warm and abundantly irrigated, some to the dry grounds demanding far less of moisture but also other and various substitutes have been presented to Ceylon. Manioc, maize, the potato, the turnip, have all been cultivated.
What I had been constructing and practicing all the afternoon sotto voce was a kind of ballad, an extremely simple tale of a poor Indian living alone with his young family in a season of dearth; how day after day he ranged the voiceless woods, to return each evening with nothing but a few withered sour berries in his hand, to find his lean, large-eyed wife still nursing the fire that cooked nothing, and his children crying for food, showing their bones more plainly through their skins every day; and how, without anything miraculous, anything wonderful, happening, that barrenness passed from earth, and the garden once more yielded them pumpkin and maize, and manioc, the wild fruits ripened, and the birds returned, filling the forest with their cries; and so their long hunger was satisfied, and the children grew sleek, and played and laughed in the sunshine; and the wife, no longer brooding over the empty pot, wove a hammock of silk grass, decorated with blue-and-scarlet feathers of the macaw; and in that new hammock the Indian rested long from his labours, smoking endless cigars.
He tarries for dinner at the estancia of another Paraguayan, Don Matias Ramirez not as rich a man, but as hospitable a host, as Don Vicente who spreads before his guests for dinner a simple repast of boiled turnips and small manioc doughnuts.
Caravans may be glad if they come safely through the country of the Tuaregs, and at best they can only obtain an unmolested passage by the payment of a heavy toll. On the return journey northwards the dromedaries are laden with wares from the Sudan, rice, manioc, honey, nuts, monkey breadfruit, dried fish, ivory, ostrich feathers, india-rubber, leather, and many other things.
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