Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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When The Tamanacs Are Asked How The Human Race Survived
This Great Deluge, The Age Of Water, Of The Mexicans,
They say, a man
and a woman saved themselves on a high mountain, called Tamanacu,
situated on the banks of
The Asiveru; and casting behind them, over
their heads, the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, they saw the seeds
contained in those fruits produce men and women, who repeopled the
earth. Thus we find in all its simplicity, among nations now in a
savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished with all the
charms of imagination! A few leagues from Encaramada, a rock, called
Tepu-mereme, or the painted rock, rises in the midst of the savannah.
Upon it are traced representations of animals, and symbolic figures
resembling those we saw in going down the Orinoco, at a small distance
below Encaramada, near the town Caycara. Similar rocks in Africa are
called by travellers fetish stones. I shall not make use of this term,
because fetishism does not prevail among the natives of the Orinoco;
and the figures of stars, of the sun, of tigers, and of crocodiles,
which we found traced upon the rocks in spots now uninhabited,
appeared to me in no way to denote the objects of worship of those
nations. Between the banks of the Cassiquiare and the Orinoco, between
Encaramada, the Capuchino, and Caycara, these hieroglyphic figures are
often seen at great heights, on rocky cliffs which could be accessible
only by constructing very lofty scaffolds.
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