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For they knew something of which the Americans were not aware that Monitaya had improved on the trench-trap idea of the whites by studding the bottom of those trenches with barbed araya bones smeared with wurali.
Beyond these a thin but deadly line of bowmen poured arrows in high-looping curves over the heads of the hand-to-hand combatants, the shafts whizzing far up, turning, and plunging down unerringly into the center of the enemy force. Each of those arrows could, and many did, end the lives of two or three adversaries by gouging their skins and letting the fearful wurali into their blood.
Their own clubbers and stabbers were charging out and smashing skulls or piercing abdomens, their arrows rose in all directions at once, and some into whose veins the wurali had struck sprang in the last moments of life on nearby foes and bit like mad dogs.
Great bows and arrows, such as the hunters had borne, were supplemented here by the long clubs of heavy wood and by ugly spears. The clubs terminated in balls studded with jaguar teeth. The spears were triple pronged, each prong ending in a saw-toothed araya bone and each bone darkened by the fatal wurali.
"Experiments have been made with the wurali of the Macusis," he stated. "It was tried on a hog, a sloth and a sloth is mighty hard to kill also on mules, and on a full-grown ox weighing almost half a ton. It killed every one of them." A momentary silence followed. Tim gazed sourly at the arrow, now harmless but still sinister. "Urrrgh!" he growled.
"This point has been dipped in wurali poison." "You have seen such arrows before, Capitao?" "Seen the poison before, yes. Over in British Guiana.
He had had no sleep; he had lain in the gates of death; his arm ached cruelly; yet a warm glow shone in his hollow eyes as he reflected on the fact that in all the unwritten history of his people he was the first man to survive the inexorable power of the wurali. As long as he lived this fact would lift him above the level of all his fellows.
The Macusi Indians make it from the wurali vine, some bitter root or other, a couple of bulbous plants, two kinds of ants one big and black with a venomous bite, the other small and red a lot of pepper, and the pounded fangs of labarri and couanacouchi snakes. They boil all this stuff down to a thick syrup, and that's the poison. The man who makes it is sick for days afterward."
Those detailed to the work of polluting the streams gathered quantities of blue-blossomed, short-podded plants with yellow roots, the roots being pulped and thrown into the slow currents, which straightway became fatal to man or beast The wurali squad procured their favorite materials and, in a flimsy shed well away from the houses, prepared a plentiful supply of the venomed brew.
Tim shook his head, his abhorrence of poison strong as ever. Knowlton spoke. "I've heard that this wurali poison is much overrated, that it will kill only birds and monkeys, not men." "Por Deus! Whoever said that was a fool trying to appear wise!" Pedro snorted. "We have seen the poison death, and we know." McKay also shook his head.
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