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In some places we saw clay pots and bowls. They wove their cotton, though not very skillfully. They crushed their maize in hand mills. We found caciques and butios, and heard of their main cacique, Gwarionex. But he did not come to meet us; they said he had gone on a visit to Caonabo in Cibao.
There were movable idols, called Zemés, which represented inferior deities. The Catholic writers call them messengers and mediators, having their own saints in mind. These were the original deities of the island. The cacique took precedence of the butios, in theory, at least, and designated the days for public worship.
He received for answer, that within a few years there should come to the island a nation covered with clothing, which should destroy all their customs and ceremonies, and slay their children or reduce them to painful servitude. The tradition was probably invented by the Butios, or priests, after the Spaniards had begun to exercise their severities.
He would live with and teach the Guaricos, becoming butio he and Guarin butios together. I pondered it. If the Admiral came not again it was the one thing to do. I remember the very odor and exquisite touch of the morning. Guarin was away. I had to myself cave and ledge and little waterfall and great trees that now I was telling one from another.
He is talking to his zeme. They are all butios?" "Yes. Most of them are good men." "What is going to happen here to all my people? Something is over against me and my people, I feel it! Even the cacique has fear." "It is the dark Ignorance and the light Ignorance, the clothed Ignorance and the naked Ignorance. I feel it too, what you feel.
The walls of these caverns were covered with pictured distortions, half man, half animal, which yielded to the priests, or butios, interpretations according to the light and shadow. Some of these vaults are lighted through a natural fissure in the roof, and the worship or augury commenced at the moment the sun struck through it.
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