, when it went to the bottom.

CHAPTER XV

Bororo Superstitions--The Bororo Language--Bororo Music

[Illustration: Bororo Indians.]

THE Bororos were superstitious to a degree. They believed in evil
spirits. Some of these, they said, inhabited the earth; others were
invisible and lived "all over the air," to use their expression. The
aerial ones were not so bad as those on earth. It was to the latter that
their invocations were made--not directly, but through a special
individual called the _barih_, a kind of medicine man, who, shouting at
the top of his voice while gazing skyward, offered gifts of food, meat,
fish and grain to the _boppe_ or spirits invoked. There were two kinds of
_barih_: a superior one with abnormal powers, and an inferior one. The
_barih_ eventually pretended that the spirit had entered his body. He
then began to devour the food himself, in order to appease the hunger of
his internal guest and become on friendly terms with him. The wife of the
_barih_, who on those occasions stood by his side, was generally asked to
partake of the meal, but only after the _barih_ had half chewed the
various viands, when he gracefully took them with his fingers from his
own mouth and placed them between the expectant lips of his better half.
She sometimes accepted them--sometimes not. All according to her
appetite, I suppose, and perhaps to the temporary terms on which she
was that day with her husband.

The Bororos, curiously enough, spoke constantly of the
hippopotamus--_ajie_, as they called it--and even imitated to perfection
the sounds made by that amphibious animal. This was indeed strange,
because the hippopotamus did not exist in South America, nor has it ever
been known to exist there. The women of the Bororos were in perfect
terror of the _ajie_, which was supposed to appear sometimes breaking
through the earth. Personally, I believed that the _ajie_ was a clever
ruse of the Bororo men, in order to keep their women at home when they
went on hunting expeditions. Boys were trained to whirl round from the
end of a long pole a rectangular, flat piece of wood attached to a long
fibre or a string. Its violent rotation round the pole, with the
revolutions of the tablet around itself at different speeds, reproduced
to perfection the sounds of blowing and snorting of the hippopotamus. The
whizzing of this device could be heard at astonishing distances. The
credulous women were rendered absolutely