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I remember among them a spare pair of very dirty trousers, a battered tin cup, a wooden spoon such as Kaffirs use to eat their scoff with, a bottle full of some doubtful compound, sundry roots and other native medicines, an old pipe I had given him, and last but not least, a huge head of yellow tobacco in the leaf, of a kind that the Mazitu, like the Pongos, cultivate to some extent.
Then at length at a signal they got out their paddles, and, still shouting curses and defiance at us, rowed away till they became but specks upon the bosom of the great lake and vanished. Two of the canoes we captured, however, and with them six or seven Pongos.
With the exception of certain tales of its almost supernatural cunning, this was all that I could learn about the god of the Pongos which I have sometimes been tempted to believe was really a devil hid in the body of a huge and ancient ape. No, there was one more thing which I quote because it bears out Babemba's story.
After quoting the account of the great Pongo, Buffon justly remarks, that all the 'Jockos' and 'Orangs' hitherto brought to Europe were young; and he suggests that, in their adult condition, they might be as big as the Pongo or 'great Orang'; so that, provisionally, he regarded the Jockos, Orangs, and Pongos as all of one species.
Barrow observes, that among the great number of these rapids there is one fall, which alone is thirty feet high. On the other hand, the famous pongos of the river Amazon, so dangerous to go up, the falls of Rentema, of Escurrebragas, and of Mayasi, are but a few feet in perpendicular height.
I have already written of that journey and our extraordinary adventures, and need therefore allude to it no more here, except to say that during the course of it I was sorely tempted to travel to the territory north of the lake in which the Pongos dwelt. Much did I desire to see whether Messrs.
These white Guaharibos have constructed a bridge of lianas above the cataract, supported on rocks that rise, as generally happens in the pongos of the Upper Maranon, in the middle of the river. The existence of this bridge, which is known to all the inhabitants of Esmeralda,* seems to indicate that the Orinoco must be very narrow at this point.
Though I have expressed my doubts of the existence of an unknown species of large monkey in a continent which appears entirely destitute of quadrumanous animals of the family of the orangs, cynocephali, mandrils, and pongos; yet it should be remembered that almost all matters of popular belief, even those most absurd in appearance, rest on real facts, but facts ill observed.
And one of these will walk in the woods alone and kill the Pongos with their poysoned arrows." The existence of this tribe has been established by a German expedition, one of the members of which, Dr. Falkenstein, photographed and measured an adult male whose stature was four feet six inches.
The Abbe Prevost and Buffon between them, however, did a good deal more disfigurement to Battell's sober account than 'cutting off an article. Thus Battell's statement that the Pongos "cannot speake, and have no understanding more than a beast," is rendered by Buffon "qu'il ne peut parler 'quoiqu'il ait plus d'entendement que les autres animaux'"; and again, Purchas' affirmation, "He told me in conference with him, that one of these Pongos tooke a negro boy of his which lived a moneth with them," stands in the French version, "un pongo lui enleva un petit negre qui passa un 'an' entier dans la societe de ces animaux."
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