A very small portion of the Montaña is occupied or inhabited. The old Inca civilization did not penetrate it, nor did the Spaniards of the Colonial period, nor yet did the white folk of the Andine Republics establish more than nominal sway over savage nature and savage man in these remote regions. Beyond the few settlers who live isolated from the world, the folk consist of more or less uncivilized tribes of Indians. Each of these tribes generally bears its distinctive name and has its various customs--curious, useful or bestial. The Aguarunas of the Marañon build fixed dwellings and cultivate the soil. They are of middle stature, the women often well-featured, and both sexes wear short garments, in distinction to other tribes which go naked and unashamed. A warlike people, fighting with poisoned arrows, they have on various occasions destroyed the white man's settlements. These people signal their messages through the forest for long distances by means of the _tunduy_--a hollow log tautly suspended from a cord attached to a tree, and which reaches the ground, and struck hard blows with a club it emits a far-carrying sound, which, under a species of "morse" code, carries the message onward--a kind of native "wireless-telegraphy." The Campas Indians occupy an enormous territory on the great Urubamba and Ucayali Rivers, and have assimilated some degree of civilization and are friendly to the whites. The Nahumedes are those who attacked Orellana and were taken for women-warriors. The Orejones are so called from the practice of making their ears of enormous size, by inserting weights in the lobes. The Huitoto Indians, in Peru and Colombia, were those who suffered under the excesses of the Putumayo, the great stream descending from the Colombian Andes. It would be impossible here to enumerate the many tribes of the Montaña. Some of them were influenced by the Incas, and in consequence are of a higher calibre. The Incas, according to the legends, had a God-given mission to civilize the rude folk of Western South America, and marvellously they carried it out, in a way that puts the modern white man to shame, with his ruthless negligence or with the studied barbarity he has visited upon the poor aboriginal rubber-gatherers. Many of these tribes cultivate the ground and subsist upon the fruits of their toil. Many of them have a more or less hazy belief in a Supreme Deity, evolved from their inner consciousness or inherited from the Incas or from the childhood of the world. The tribes have no particular cohesion, and are thus at the mercy of whoever may oppress them. At the head of each tribe is generally a _curaca_, a chief chosen by reason of his superior strength or ferocity. Often they dwell in huge community-houses.