Today's white people know nothing about the xapiri [nature spirits] who inhabit their land and they never even think about them. Yet they always existed, long before the white people themselves were created. The spirits are truly numerous there! This is why I was seized by such dizziness as I approached their home. We shamans, we know these faraway xapiri because we bring them down in the forest [to visit] by drinking the yãkoana [psychedelic herb]. They live in the coolness of the highlands, away from the white people and their cities full of fumes. I saw the mountains where their homes are with my own eyes. Their peaks are covered in a dazzling whiteness like a huge heap of down feathers.

I traveled there in dream when I was burning with malaria heat and discovered the pristine water spring where the spirits drink. They joyously bathe and frolic there despite the glacial winds that surround them, and their hands are as frozen as the water. This is why they are so good at curing fevers. This is also where the envelopes full of clear water come from, which white people sell to quench their thirst. It is the same water as the water that comes down from our forest's rocky peaks. we shamans call it mãu krouma u, the water of the krouma frog, or mãu pora u, the water of the waterfall.

Even though today's white people of Europe have forgotten it, the xapiri who live on their land are the images of their ancestors who died long ago. These are the images of the first outsiders with ghost talk whom the shamans call napënapëri. These ancestors were the ones who passed down their words to the white people. They were the ones who put the tall stones of Omama's house in place [Avebury stone circle, England] and created the first merchandise, paper skins, and medicine.

I often saw their images dance during my first trip to this distant land. They came down in my dream in the form of ghosts, like the xapiri do in the forest. They reached me easily because I slept right where Omama created these first outsiders with the foam of the Hayowari people's blood in the beginning of time.

The napënapëri spirits want to keep the beauty of their mirror-land and protect it from epidemic fumes, yet today's white people no longer know how to take care of it, and they know nothing of these images, which are those of their ancestors. This worries me too. In the past, their long-ago elders knew them and made them dance. They knew how to imitate their songs and build their spirit houses for the young people who wanted to become shamans.

But then those who were born after them began to create the cities. Little by little they stopped hearing these spirits' words. Then the books made them forgetful, and they finally rejected them. As I have said, Teosi [Deus, the Christian god] was jealous of the beauty of the xapiri's words. He constantly spoke ill of them: "Do not listen to those spirits that soil your chest! They are inhabitants of the forest, they are bad. They are just animals! Stop calling their images, just eat them! Instead of listening to them, contemplate my words glued on paper skins!" Teosi's words of anger spread everywhere and chased the xapiri's song from the white elders' thoughts. Their minds became tangled and confused, always in search of new words.

Yet the spirits of this distant land are not dead. They still live in the mountains that Omama gave them for houses and they only come down from them for the shamans who are able to see them.