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Craning her head inside, and listening for a second or two, she can tell by his breathing that the cacique is asleep. A slumber abruptly broken by her calling out "Son of Naraguana, awake!" "Shebotha!" he exclaims, recognising her shrill treble. "What is it?" he adds, raising his head over the edge of his hamaca. "Arise, Aguara! and make all haste.
That the showers may not find me unprepared, I pack with my hamaca an extra length of rope, to be stretched taut from foot-post to head-post, that a tarpaulin or canvas may be slung over it. When a treeless country is presented to me in prospect, I have two stout stakes prepared, and I do not move forward without them.
At an early age, this unnatural advice held my mind, so that I devised innumerable means of verifying it; I was filled with a despair and longing whenever I met it anew. But it was an ambition appeased only in maturity. And this is the miracle of the tropics: climb up into the hamaca, and, at this altitude, draw in the hole of the mosquitaro funnel, making it fast with a single knot. It is done.
I felt that I had acquired merit that eventful day when a pair of hummingbirds thimblefuls of fluff with flaming breastplates and caps of gold looked upon me with such favor that they made the strands of my hamaca their boudoir.
They lay each of them in a cotton hamaca, which we call Brazil beds, and two women attending them with six cups, and a little ladle to fill them out of an earthen pitcher of wine; and so they drank each of them three of those cups at a time one to the other, and in this sort they drink drunk at their feasts and meetings.
It has even its own weird harmony for I have often heard a low, whistling hum as the air rushed through the cordage mesh. In a sudden tropical gale every taut strand of my hamaca has seemed a separate, melodious, orchestral note, while I was buffeted to and fro, marking time to some rhythmic and reckless tune of the wind playing fortissimo on the woven strings about me.
I have seen an Indian sink his hamaca posts into sand with one swift, concentrated motion, mathematical in its precision and surety, so that he might enter at once into a peaceful night of tranquil and unbroken slumber, while I, a tenderfoot then, must needs beat my stakes down into the ground with tremendous energy, only to come to earth with a resounding thwack the moment I mounted my couch.
This gentle aerial support is distributed throughout hundreds of fine meshes, and the sole contact with the earth is through twin living boles, pulsing with swift running sap, whose lichened bark and moonlit foliage excel any tapestry of man's devising. Perhaps it is atavistic this desire to rest and swing in a hamaca.
In a jungle hut a loud cry from out of the black treetops now and then reaches the ear; in a tent the faint noises of the night outside are borne on the wind, and at times the silhouette of a passing animal moves slowly across the heavy cloth; but in a hamaca one is not thus set apart to be baffled by hidden mysteries one is given the very point of view of the creatures who live and die in the open.
The dandies among them added to this airy apparel a few bright feathers in their hair, a shell or two in their ears and nostrils. The huts were built square or oblong, raised somewhat above the ground, with only one opening for entrance and exit, cane being the principal building material. The chief piece of furniture was the "hamáca," made with creepers or strips of bark of the "emajágua" tree.
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