Our visit to Tumatumari was supposedly at the end of the wet season;
notwithstanding this, it rained copiously nearly every day, and
invariably each night. We spent the evenings on the wide veranda of
our habitation, preparing specimens or writing notes. Myriads of
insects, attracted by our bright lamps, fluttered in and out of the
darkness and settled on the white walls. Our two colored assistants,
whom we had brought from Georgetown, were trained and enthusiastic
entomologists, having been employed by Doctor Rodway of the Georgetown
Museum, and spent several hours each night with net and cyanide bottle.
Frequently they caught several hundred specimens in a short time. They
also prepared cages of fine wire netting in which caterpillars were
imprisoned and carefully fed, and glass boxes, or “incubators” for
cocoons; in this work they were most successful, and a number of moths
of rare and desirable species were reared to a state of perfection.
Sometimes the downpour was so heavy that it disturbed small birds in
their sleep in the bushes; on several occasions finches (_Sicalis_)
fluttered up to the lamp in a dazed or bewildered manner, when we
caught them easily and placed them in a cage, liberating them the next
morning.
Numbers of Indians of the Patamona tribe live in the surrounding
forest. They are a friendly though primitive people, and some of
them speak or understand a few words of English. We accompanied the
Protector of Indians, a British official living at Tumatumari, to one
of the Indian dwellings one day. It seems that a negro had promised
to marry a Patamona woman, then ran away, when she promptly married a
man of her own tribe. Learning of this, the former suitor had written
a letter to the officer demanding either his bride or damages. The
official spent a very bad hour trying to explain the situation to the
woman in the limited Patamona vocabulary at his command, while she
sat stolidly in a hammock. When he had finished, she calmly remarked,
“Well, you tell him I think he is a damn fool,” in perfect English!