hite with lime dissolved in water. There were
some puzzling carvings, which interested me greatly. I could not quite
make up my mind at first whether those carvings had been made by Indians
or whether they were the work of escaped negro slaves who had found
shelter in those distant caves. In character they appeared to me Indian.
Negroes, as a rule, are not much given to rock-carving in order to record
thoughts or events. Moreover, those primitive carvings showed strong
characteristics of hunting people, such as the Indians were. There were
conventional attempts at designing human figures--both male and
female--by mere lines such as a child would draw: one round dot for the
head and one line each for the body, arms, and legs. Curiously
enough--and this persuaded me that the drawings had been done by
Indians--none of the figures possessed more than three fingers or toes to
any extremity. As we have seen, the Indians cannot count beyond
three--unlike members of most African tribes, who can all count at least
up to five. This, nevertheless, did not apply to representations of
footmarks, both human and animal--which were reproduced with admirable
fidelity, I think because the actual footprints on the rock itself had
been used as a guide before the carving had been made. I saw the
representation of a human footmark, the left, with five toes, and the
shape of the foot correctly drawn. Evidently the artist or a friend had
stood on his right foot while applying the left to the side of the rock.
When they attempted to draw a human foot on a scale smaller than nature,
they limited themselves to carving two lines at a wide angle, to form the
heel, and five dots to represent the toes.

The most wonderful of those rock carvings were the footprints of the
jaguar (_onca_), reproduced with such perfection that it seemed almost as
if they had been left there by the animal itself. Not so happy were the
representations of human heads--one evidently of an Indian chief, with an
aureole of feathers, showing a painfully distorted vision on the part of
the artist. The eyes were formed by two circles in poor alignment, the
nose by a vertical line, and the mouth, not under but by the side of the
nose, represented by two concentric curves.

A figure in a sitting posture was interesting enough--like a T upside
down, with a globe for a head and a cross-bar for arms. The hands had
three fingers each, but there were only two toes to each foot.

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