The only other building at Puerto Guineo, in addition to the convent, is an old, dilapidated church, both of which stand on the bank of the river in a small clearing sowed with plantain-trees. As already stated, the priests of Mocoa often come down to Guineo for a few days at a time to preach to the aborigines, and the convent and church were built by the Indians, partly for the convenience of the _padres_ and partly as a sort of monument to their own importance. Like the convent, the church is of bamboo with an earthen floor and a thatched roof, upon which some vegetation was beginning to present itself. Inside were a few crude pictures of saints, and behind the altar stood a cross with a ghastly figure of the Crucifixion upon it. A few cheap altar-cloths and the remains of several used-up candles completed the outfit, the whole of which was entirely covered and wound up with numerous cobwebs. In the midst of the dense forest, surrounding these neglected relics of civilisation, live a tribe of Indians who call themselves Cionis and speak a language of the same name. They are quite distinct from the Incas, and occupy the whole region of the Upper Putumayo, living in small villages of from ten to fifty families along its banks. In all, they do not number over a thousand. But they all speak more or less Spanish, with the peculiarity that the only form of the verb they use is the gerund. These Indians are short, broad, and strong, but generally lazy and shiftless. Like the Mocoa branch of the Incas, nearly all of them suffer from _carate_. The ugly and unusual custom of pulling out the eyebrows, eye-lashes, &c., and cutting the hair short is observed by both sexes. The women are, if possible, uglier than the men, which is saying a good deal, but the latter endeavour to compensate for this by painting their faces blue and pink. The ordinary designs used for this purpose are geometrical figures and branches of trees, &c. Another very common custom is that of piercing the ears and the dividing wall of the nose with small bamboo tubes coloured a bright shining black, and frequently from ten to fifteen centimetres in length and nearly one centimetre in thickness. They also generally wear upon each arm, just between the shoulder and the elbow, a sort of bracelet, made of fibres from the leaf of the _chambira_[46] palm, the loose ends of which reach almost to the wrist--this is supposed to ward off attacks of rheumatism and other similar complaints. Their dress is very simple, and consists merely of a long shirt called _cushma_, of black or white cotton--although generally the latter--which is worn by both men and women. The only difference between the men's _cushma_ and the women's is that in the former the opening that admits the head is vertical and runs down along the bosom, while in the latter it is horizontal and reaches from shoulder to shoulder. This garment resembles nothing so much as a night-shirt without sleeves.