ral throughout the
religions of America.[47]

The myth of the thunder storm also appears among them in its triplicate
nature so common to the American mind. God of the storm was Guabancex,
whose statue was made of stones. When angry he sent before him as
messenger, Guatauva, to gather the winds, and accompanied by
Coatrischie, who collected the rain-clouds in the valleys of the
mountains, he swept down upon the plain, surrounded by the awful
paraphernalia of the thunder storm.[48]

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 Atabeira 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 w