Let us place side by side with these ancient myths the national legend of the Arawacks.[49] They tell of a supreme spiritual being Yauwahu or Yauhahu. Pain and sickness are the invisible shafts he shoots at men, _yauhahu simaira_ the arrows of Yauhahu, and he it is whom the priests invoke in their incantations. Once upon a time, men lived without any means to propitiate this unseen divinity; they knew not how to ward off his anger or conciliate him. At that time the Arawacks did not live in Guiana, but in an island to the north. One day a man named Arawanili walked by the waters grieving over the ignorance and suffering of his nation. Suddenly the spirit of the waters, the woman Orehu, rose from the waves and addressed him. She taught him the mysteries of _semeci_, the sorcery which pleases and controls Yauhahu, and presented him with the _maraka_, the holy calabash containing white pebbles which they rattle during their exorcisms, and the sound of which summons the beings of the unseen world. Arawanili faithfully instructed his people in all that Orehu had said, and thus rescued them from their wretchedness. When after a life of wisdom and good deeds the hour of his departure came, he “did not die, but went up.” Orehu accompanied the Arawacks when they moved to the main, and still dwells in a treeless, desolate spot, on the banks of the Pomeroon. The negroes of the colony have learned of her, and call her in their broken English, the “watra-mamma,” the water-mother. The proper names which occur in these myths, date back to the earliest existence of the Arawacks as an independent tribe, and are not readily analyzed by the language as it now exists. The Haitian Yocauna seems indeed identical with the modern Yauhahu. Atabes or Atabéira is probably from _itabo_, lake, lagoon, and _era_, water, (the latter only in composition, as _hurruru_, mountain, _era_, water, mountain-water, a spring, a source), and in some of her actions corresponds with Orehu. Caracaracol is translated by Brother Pane, as “the Scabby” or the one having ulcers, and in this respect the myth presents a curious analogy with many others in America. In modern Arawack _karrikala_ is a form, in the third person singular, from _karrin_, to be sick, to be pregnant. Arawanili, which one might be tempted to suppose gave the name Arawack to the tribe, did not all writers derive this differently, may be a form of _awawa_, father. In the old language, the termination _el_, is said to have meant son.