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A full- sized Zarabatana is heavy, and can only be used by an adult Indian who has had great practice. The young lads learn to shoot with smaller and lighter tubes. When Mr. Wallace and I had lessons at Barra in the use of the blow-gun, of Julio, a Juri Indian, then in the employ of Mr. Hauxwell, an English bird- collector, we found it very difficult to hold steadily the long tubes.
It is generally made as a liquid, but the Juri and Miranha tribes on the Japura make it up in the form of a black paste by a mode of preparation I could not learn; it is then called Tucupi-pixuna, or black Tucupi I have seen the Indians on the Tapajos, where fish is scarce, season Tucupi with Sauba ants.
Now the woman at the time was pregnant and not knowing what else to do, she promised that when her child was born, if it were a daughter she would marry her to the river snake and if it were a son that, when the boy grew up he should become the "juri" or "name friend" of the snake.
We anchored close to an igarite, whose owner was an old Juri Indian, disfigured by a large black tatooed patch in the middle of his face, and by his hair being close cropped, except a fringe in front of the head. In the afternoon we went ashore. The population seemed to consist chiefly of semi-civilised Indians, living as usual in half- finished mud hovels.
We had on board, among our deck-passengers, a middle-aged Indian, of the Juri tribe; a short, thickset man, with features resembling much those of the late Daniel O'Connell. He was dressed in European-style black hat, coat, and trousers looking very uncomfortable in the dreadful heat which, it is unnecessary to say, exists on board a steamer, under a vertical sun, during mid- day hours.
One of the houses belonged to a Juri family, and we saw the owner, an erect, noble- looking old fellow, tattooed, as customary with his tribe, in a large patch over the middle of his face, fishing under the shade of a colossal tree in his port with hook and line. He saluted us in the usual grave and courteous manner of the better sort of Indians as we passed by.
They were under the jurisdiction of the Praetor Urbanus, but vicarious justice was administered among them by an official called Praefectus juri dicundo, sent yearly from Rome. A Roman who joined a Latin colony ceased to be a Roman citizen. Whether there was any difference between the internal administration of a Latin colony and an old Latin town is uncertain.
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