United States or Brunei ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The reply was a yell of anger and hatred from the Indians, who were blocking the way, while one of them, springing to his feet, shouted: "Go back, dogs of Spaniards; go back! This is the land of the Mayubuna, and we will permit no Spaniard to set foot upon its soil.
By causing the death of seventeen men of the Mayubuna, by creating seventeen widows and forty-six fatherless children, for whom the rest of the villagers must now provide food. For this great wrong ye are doomed to die; and it rests with yourselves whether your death shall be quick, or whether it shall be one of long-drawn-out torment.
They requested further, that in the event of the white men being captured, they should be sent back down the river to pay the penalty for having caused the death of seventeen Mayubuna Indians.
But it was not until they had been journeying a full month, after their escape from the Mayubuna, that their next really important adventure befell.
But by and by, when it was broad daylight, one of the Mayubuna who had recognised the possibilities of concealment afforded by the ceiba detected spots here and there on two of the depending lianas where small strips of the bark had been freshly torn off as though somebody had very recently climbed up them, and to this he immediately directed the attention of the rest, with the result that it soon became a practical certainty that the fugitives were somewhere in that tree.
Thanks to the help afforded by a strong breeze from the north-east, the end of their second day's journeying on the Maranon found them some seventy miles above the spot where they had struck the river, and in the territory had they but known it of the fierce and warlike Mayubuna Indians.
It is not necessary to give a detailed description of our friends' doings, day after day, during their sojourn with the Mayubuna Indians; the above indication will enable the reader to picture the uneventful sort of existence which they led; and it is only needful to add that so well did the young Englishmen contrive matters that by the time that they had been three months in the village the suspicion and distrust with which they had at first been regarded had entirely disappeared, and the Indians seemed to have gathered the impression that their white prisoners had quite settled down and were content to spend the remainder of their lives with them.
Dost thou not yet know that Indians generally, and the Mayubuna in particular, have a very wholesome dread and horror of thunderstorms, believing, as they do, that the evil spirits come abroad and hold high revel upon such occasions?
Did not I make to your leader all the signs of amity and goodwill? But he rejected them; he called us dogs of Spaniards; bade us go back by the way that we had come; and himself shot the arrow which led to all the trouble. Is that the way in which the Mayubuna treat those who come to them as friends?" "How do I know that ye come as friends?" demanded the cacique.
But although they had escaped for the moment, Phil and Dick still had plenty of cause for anxiety; for they had by this time been long enough in the wilds to have learned that when Indians are hostile their hostility is very bitter and pertinacious; and they could scarcely hope that, having mistaken them for Spaniards who at that time were more feared and hated than any other earthly thing by the Indians the Mayubuna would be satisfied with the issue of their first encounter with the white men.
Word Of The Day