Читать книгу Roraima and British Guiana, With a Glance at Bermuda, the West Indies, and the Spanish Main онлайн

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We drove out one day to a farm to witness its manufacture. We soon came to fields covered with the plant, which grows to a height of about four feet. In appearance it is a slender-knotted grey stem, with branches at the top from which spring red stalks of broad digitated leaves. The root, which is cylindrical and about a foot long, is a deadly poison in its natural state, but by a simple process it is converted into nutritious food. As we approached the wattled shed in which it was being prepared, we heard sounds of a veritable pandemonium. On looking in, we saw thirty or forty jet black Africans stripped to the skin and furiously grating the white roots against a rough board, the meal falling into great tubs.

The exertion was apparently immense, as they steamed with perspiration, and, as if the fumes of the poison got into their heads, they would every now and then utter yells or bound into the air. To this wild scene there was a musical accompaniment. The instruments consisted of tom-toms, pipes, chac-chacs, and long bamboos, struck by pieces of wood, and a strange concern made of cane-work, from which issued a grating sound by drawing a stick quickly up and down. Music from such sources was not likely to be of a high order, but it was conscientiously gone through at all events. All that lungs could blow was blown; all that fists could do to break a drum skin was done. White, eyes rolled, black lips blew, and black fists struck. The “grater” sounded worse than the grating, and the monotonous chant of one of the performers was more horrible than the howls of the workers. Never had I heard a like “charivari.” “Ils ont de la couleur,” said the pleased proprietor, as he rubbed his hand and glanced at the rapidly filling tubs. The next operation is to get rid of the poisonous juices. Here, as the factory was on a large scale, the meal was put into a great sort of oven and the poison extracted by heat or pressure. But the usual mode, and the one invariably applied by the Indians of Guiana, where in after-days I many a time witnessed the operation, is as follows: A long plaited tube—matapi—made of a certain reed is filled with the grated meal; its upper end is fastened to a beam so that its lower end, which possesses a loop-hole, hangs a few feet from the ground. A pole is then passed through the loop and the shorter end firmly fixed so that the longer, when pressed down, serves as a lever; the elastic tube presses the meal together, and the poisonous juice escapes through the interstices. The flour is then dried and sifted. When required for use, a handful is baked over a fire on a flat plate, and in a few minutes “cassava bread,” resembling an enormous oatmeal cake, is ready. If required for a journey, it is thoroughly dried in the sun until it is as hard as a nail, and will then last for months; if not properly dried, it quickly gets mouldy and uneatable. Cassiripe, which is the extracted poison-juice of cassava, is the foundation of the well-known “pepper pot,” which is an “olla podrida” of meat and peppers cooked in an earthen pot, and always on hand in the West Indies. Fortunately, the deleterious principle of the juice is so volatile that it is entirely dissipated by heat, and it then becomes a wholesome seasoning; and thus the good is extracted from the evil in this strange blending of life and death, as exhibited in the cassava root.