"M415. Tamanac. 'The girls who were forced to marry'

Amalivaca, the ancestor of the Tamanac, arrived at the time of the great deluge in which all Indians, with the exception of one man and one woman who had taken refuge on the top of a mountain, had been drowned.

While travelling in his boat, the demiurge carved the figures of the sun and moon on the Painted Rock of the Encaramada.

He had a brother called Vochi. Together they levelled the earth's surface. But in spite of all their efforts, they were unable to make the river Orinoco run both ways.

Amalivaca had daughters who were very fond of travel. So he broke their legs in order to force them to be sedentary and to populate the land of the Tamanac ..."

"... the resemblance between the respective names between the demiurges in M415 and M416, in both of which they are subjected to the ordeal of a flood which destroys mankind and then entrusted with the reorganization of the world, suggests that the two symmetrical episodes of the original legless couple and the demiurge's daughters with broken legs should be treated as inverted sequences.

Amalivaca broke his daughters' legs in order to prevent them travelling hither and thither and to force them to remain in one place, so that their procreative powers, which had no doubt been put to wrong uses during their adventurous wanderings, should henceforth be confined to increasing the Tamanac population.

Conversely, Mayowoca bestows legs on a primeval and, of necessity, sedentary couple, so that they can both move about freely and procreate.

In M415, the sun and the moon are fixed or, to be more exact, their joint representation in the form of rock carvings provides a definitive gauge of the moderate distance separating them and the relative proximity uniting them. But, since the rock is motionless, the river below should - supposing creation were perfect - flow both ways, thus equalizing the journeys upstream and downstream.

Anyone who has travelled in a canoe knows that a distance that can be covered in a few hours when the journey is downstream may require several days if the direction is reversed.

The river flowing two ways corresponds then, in spatial terms, to the search, in temporal terms, for a correct balance between the respective durations of day and night ... such a balance should also be obtainable through the appropriate distance between the moon and the sun being measured out in the form of rock carvings ..." (The Origin of Table Manners)