The Origin of Fire
The woman who offered him the bowl of maize beer was extraordinarily beautiful. Like everyone else at the party, she wore nothing but crimson macaw feathers in her straight, black hair and the red urucú paint that for her, seemed to swim across her smiling face. She beckoned.
The boy, newly arrived and newly invigorated, stood dumb and open-mouthed. His body had been drenched just moments before, but now his skin was dry in the effervescent night air. His lungs breathed clear, cough and wheeze and phlegm all but a distant memory. His eyes were assaulted by the sight of hundreds of laughing young men and women dancing, feasting, drinking on the wide field; his ears, by the mellifluous sounds of the hüroroin, those long bamboo flutes spewing plaintive notes resonating fr
