Sepulchral Cave in South America.

—In the shady and solitary place, on the declivity of a high mountain, opens the cave of Ataruipe. It is less a cave than a projecting rock, in which the waters have scoped a great hollow when, in the ancient revolutions of our planet, they had reached to the height.

In this tomb of a whole extinct tribe was soon counted nearly 600 skeletons in good preservation, and arranged so regularly that it would have been difficult to make an error in numbering them.

Each skeleton rests upon a kind of basket formed of the petioles of palms.

These baskets, which the natives call mapires, have the form of a square bag.— Their size is proportional to the age of the dead; and there are even some for infants which had died at the moment of birth.— We saw them from ten inches and a half to three feet six inches and a half in length.

All the skeletons are bent, and so entire that no rib or a bone of the fingers and toes is wanting.

The bones have been prepared in three different ways; whitened in the air and sun, dyed red with aroto, a coloring matter obtained from the bixa orellanx; or, like mummies, covered with odorous resins, and enveloped in leaves of heliconia and banana.

The Indians related to us that the corpse is first placed in the humid earth, that the flesh may be consumed by degrees.

Some months after, it is taken out and the flesh that remains on the bones is scraped off with sharp stones.

Near the mapires or baskets there were vases of half burnt clay, which appeared to contain the bones of the same family.

The largest of these vases or funeral urns are three feet two inches high, and four feet six inches long.

The handles are made in the form of crocodiles or serpents, and the edge is encircled by meanders, labyrinths, and greeques, with narrow lines variously combined.— Humboldt.