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In these festival habiliments the Tucunas go through their monotonous see-saw and stamping dances accompanied by singing and drumming, and keep up the sport often for three or four days and nights in succession, drinking enormous quantities of caysuma, smoking tobacco, and snuffing parica powder.
The broad forest roads continue, as I was told, a distance of several days' journey into the interior, which is peopled by Tucunas and other Indians, living in scattered houses and villages nearly in their primitive state, the nearest village lying about six miles from St. Paulo.
There is among them a trace of festival keeping; but the only ceremony used is the drinking of cashiri beer, and fermented liquors made of Indian-corn, bananas, and so forth. These affairs, however, are conducted in a degenerate style, for they do not drink to intoxication, or sustain the orgies for several days and nights in succession, like the Juris Passes, and Tucunas.
The banks of all the streams are dotted with palm-thatched dwellings of Tucunas, all half-buried in the leafy wilderness, the scattered families having chosen the coolest and shadiest nooks for their abodes. When its singular notes strike the ear for the first time, the impression cannot be resisted that they are produced by a human voice.
It is singular that the graceful curved patterns used by the South Sea Islanders are quite unknown among the Brazilian red men; they being all tattooed either in simple lines or patches. The nearest approach to elegance of design which I saw was amongst the Tucunas of the Upper Amazons, some of whom have a scroll-like mark on each cheek, proceeding from the corner of the mouth.
The semi-religious dances and drinking bouts usual among the settled tribes of Amazonian Indians are indulged in to greater excess by the Tucunas than they are by most other tribes. The Jurupari or Demon is the only superior being they have any conception of, and his name is mixed up with all their ceremonies, but it is difficult to ascertain what they consider to be his attributes.
The Tucunas have the singular custom, in common with the Collinas and Mauhes, of treating their young girls, on their showing the first signs of womanhood, as if they had committed some crime. They are sent up to the girao under the smoky and filthy roof, and kept there on very meagre diet, sometimes for a whole month. I heard of one poor girl dying under this treatment.
The walls as well as the roof are covered with thatch of palm leaves each piece consisting of leaflets plaited and attached in a row to a lath many feet in length. The Tucunas excel over most of the other tribes in the manufacture of pottery.
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