chapter xiii

.

2. Brinton's Myths of the New World," p. 215.

3. Proctor's Pleasant Ways," p. 393.]

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yet fresh, and who were impressed with all its horrors, and who knew well the tenure of danger and terror on which they held all the blessings of the world, turned their attention to the study of the heavenly bodies, and sought to understand the source of the calamity which had so recently overwhelmed the world. Hence they "marked," as far as they were able, "the positions of the 'comets,'" "that they might not" again "do injury, and not trouble any one." The word here given is _Nibir_, which Mr. Smith says does not mean planets, and, in the above account, _Nibir_ is contradistinguished from the stars; they have already been arranged in constellations; hence it can only mean comets.

And the tablet proceeds, with distinct references to the Age of Darkness:

"8. The positions of the gods Bel and Hea he fixed with him,

9. And _he opened the great gates in the darkness shrouded_.

10. The fastenings were strong on the left and right.

11. In its mass, (i. e., the lower chaos,) he made a _boiling_.

12. The god Uru (the moon) _he caused to rise out_, the _night he overshadowed_,

13. To fix it also for the light of the night until the shining of the day.

14. That the month might not be broken, and in its amount be regular,

15. At the beginning of the month, at the rising of the night,

16. His (the sun's) horns are breaking through to shine on the heavens.

17. On the seventh day _to a circle he begins to swell_,

18. And stretches _toward the dawn further_,

19. When the god Shamas, (the in the horizon of heaven, in the east,

20 . . . . formed beautifully and . . .

21 . . . . to the orbit Shamas was perfected."

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Here the tablet becomes illegible. The meaning, however, seems plain:

Although to left and right, to east and west, the darkness was fastened firm, was dense, yet "the great gods opened the great gates in the darkness," and let the light through. First, the moon appeared, through a "boiling," or breaking up of the clouds, so that now men were able to once more count time by the movements of the moon. On the seventh day, Shamas, the sun, appeared; first, his horns, his beams, broke through the darkness imperfectly; then he swells to a circle, and comes nearer and nearer to perfect dawn; at last he appeared on the horizon, in the east, formed beautifully, and his orbit was perfected; i. e., his orbit could be traced continuously through the clearing heavens.

But how did the human race fare in this miserable time?

In his magnificent poem "Darkness," Byron has imagined such a blind and darkling world as these legends depict; and he has imagined, too, the hunger, and the desolation, and the degradation of the time.

We are not to despise the imagination. There never was yet a great thought that had not wings to it; there never was yet a great mind that did not survey things from above the mountain-tops.

If Bacon built the causeway over which modern science has advanced, it was because, mounting on the pinions of his magnificent imagination, he saw that poor struggling mankind needed such a pathway; his heart embraced humanity even as his brain embraced the universe.

The river which is a boundary to the rabbit, is but a landmark to the eagle. Let not the gnawers of the world, the rodentia, despise the winged creatures of the upper air.

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Byron saw what the effects of the absence of the sunlight would necessarily be upon the world, and that which he prefigured the legends of mankind tell us actually came to pass, in the dark days that followed the Drift.

He says:

"Morn came, and went--and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation, and all hearts Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light. . . . A fearful hope was all the world contained; Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour They fell and faded,--and the crackling trunks Extinguished with a crash,--and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And bid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clinchèd hands and smiled; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnashed their teeth and howled. . . . And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again--a meal was bought With blood, and each sat sullenly apart, Gorging himself in gloom, . . . and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails;--men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh The meager by the meager were devoured, Even dogs assailed their masters."

How graphic, how dramatic, how realistic is this picture! And how true!

For the legends show us that when, at last, the stones and clay had ceased to fall, and the fire had exhausted itself, and the remnant of mankind were able to dig their way out, to what an awful wreck of nature did they return.

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Instead of the fair face of the world, as they had known it, bright with sunlight, green with the magnificent foliage of the forest, or the gentle verdure of the plain, they go forth upon a wasted, an unknown land, covered with oceans of mud and stones; the very face of the country changed--lakes, rivers, hills, all swept away and lost. They wander, breathing a foul and sickening atmosphere, under the shadow of an awful darkness, a darkness which knows no morning, no stars, no moon; a darkness palpable and visible, lighted only by electrical discharges from the abyss of clouds, with such roars of thunder as we, in this day of harmonious nature, can form no conception of. It is, indeed, "chaos and ancient night." All the forces of nature are there, but disorderly, destructive, battling against each other, and multiplied a thousand-fold in power; the winds are cyclones, magnetism is gigantic, electricity is appalling.

The world is more desolate than the caves from which they have escaped. The forests are gone; the fruit-trees are swept away; the beasts of the chase have perished; the domestic animals, gentle ministers to man, have disappeared; the cultivated fields are buried deep in drifts of mud and gravel; the people stagger in the darkness against each other; they fall into the chasms of the earth; within them are the two great oppressors of humanity, hunger and terror; hunger that knows not where to turn; fear that shrinks before the whirling blasts, the rolling thunder, the shocks of blinding lightning; that knows not what moment the heavens may again open and rain fire and stones and dust upon them.

God has withdrawn his face; his children are deserted; all the, kindly adjustments of generous Nature are gone. God has left man in the midst of a material world without law; he is a wreck, a fragment, a lost particle,

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in the midst of an illimitable and endless warfare of giants.

Some lie down to die, hopeless, cursing their helpless gods; some die by their own bands; some gather around the fires of volcanoes for warmth and light--stars that attract them from afar off; some feast on such decaying remnants of the great animals as they may find projecting above the _débris_, running to them, as we shall see, with outcries, and fighting over the fragments.

The references to the worship of "the morning star," which occur in the legend, seem to relate to some great volcano in the East, which alone gave light when all the world was lost in darkness. As Byron says, in his great poem, "Darkness":

And they did live by watch-fires--and the thrones, The palaces of crownèd kings--the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, And men were gathered round their blazing homes To look once more into each other's face; Happy were they _who dwelt within the eye Of the volcanoes and their mountain-torch_."

In this pitiable state were once the ancestors of all mankind.

If you doubt it, reader, peruse again the foregoing legends, and then turn to the following Central American prayer, the prayer of the Aztecs, already referred to on page 186, _ante_, addressed to the god Tezcatlipoca, himself represented as a flying or winged serpent, perchance the comet:

"Is it possible that this lash and chastisement are not given for our correction and amendment, but only for our total destruction and overthrow; that _the sun will never more shine upon us, but that we must remain in perpetual darkness?_ . . . It is a sore thing to tell how we are all in

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darkness. . . . O Lord, . . . make an end of _this smoke and fog_. Quench also the _burning and destroying fire of thine anger_; let serenity come and _clearness_," (light); "let the small birds of thy people begin to sing and _approach the sun_."

There is still another Aztec prayer, addressed to the same deity, equally able, sublime, and pathetic, which it seems to me may have been uttered when the people had left their biding-place, when the conflagration had passed, but while darkness still covered the earth, before vegetation had returned, and while crops of grain as yet were not. There are a few words in it that do not answer to this interpretation, where it refers to those "people who have something"; but there may have been comparative differences of condition even in the universal poverty; or these words may have been an interpolation of later days. The prayer is as follows:

"O our Lord, protector most strong and compassionate, invisible and impalpable, thou art the giver of life; lord of all, and lord of battles. I present myself here before thee to say some few words concerning the need of the poor people of none estate or intelligence. When they lie down at night they have nothing, nor when they rise up in the morning; the darkness and the light pass alike in great poverty. Know, O Lord, that thy subjects and servants suffer a sore poverty that can not be told of more than that it is a sore poverty and desolateness. The men have no garments, nor the women, to cover themselves with, but only certain rags rent in every part, that allow the air and the cold to pass everywhere.

"With great toil and weariness they scrape together enough for each day, _going by mountain and wilderness seeking their food_; so faint and enfeebled are they that their bowels cleave to their ribs, and all their body reechoes with hollowness, and they walk as people affrighted, the face and body in likeness of death. If they be merchants, they now sell only cakes of salt and broken

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pepper; the people that have something despise their wares, so that they go out to sell from door to door, and from house to house; and when they sell nothing they sit down sadly by some fence or wall, or in some corner, licking their lips and gnawing the nails of their hands for the hunger that is in them; they look on the one side and on the other at the mouths of those that pass by, hoping peradventure that one may speak some word to them.

"O compassionate God, the bed on which they lie down is not a thing to rest upon, but to endure torment in; they draw a rag over them at night, and so sleep; there they throw down their bodies, and the bodies of children that thou hast given them. For the misery that they grow up in, for the filth of their food, for the lack of covering, their faces are yellow, and all their bodies of the color of earth. They _tremble with cold_, and for leaness they stagger in walking. They go weeping and sighing, and full of sadness, and all misfortunes are joined to them; _though they stay by afire, they find little heat_."[1]

The prayer continues in the same strain, supplicating God to give the people "some days of prosperity and tranquillity, so that they may sleep and know repose"; it concludes:

"If thou answerest my petition it will be only of thy liberality and magnificence, for no one is worthy to receive thy bounty for any merit of his, but only through thy grace. _Search below the dung-hills_ and in the mountains for thy servants, friends, and acquaintance, and raise them to riches and dignities." . . .

"Where am I? Lo, I speak with thee, O King; well do I know that I stand in an eminent place, and that I talk with one of great majesty, before whose presence flows a river through a chasm, a gulf sheer down of awful depth; this, also, is a slippery place, whence many precipitate themselves, for there shall not be found one without error before thy majesty. I myself, a man of little understanding and lacking speech, dare to address

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 204.]

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my words to thee; I put myself in peril of falling into the gorge and cavern of this river. I, Lord, have come to take with my hands, _blindness to mine eyes_, rottenness and shriveling to my members, poverty and affliction to my body; for my meanness and rudeness this it is that I merit to receive. Live and rule for ever in all quietness and tranquillity, O thou that art our lord, our shelter, our protector, most compassionate, most pitiful, invisible, impalpable."

It is true that much of all this would apply to any great period of famine, but it appears that these events occurred when there was great cold in the country, when the people gathered around fires and could not get warm, a remarkable state of things in a country possessing as tropical a climate as Mexico. Moreover, these people were wanderers, "going by mountain and wilderness," seeking food, a whole nation of poverty-stricken, homeless, wandering paupers. And when we recur to the part where the priest tells the Lord to seek his friends and servants in the mountains, "below the dung-hills," and raise them to riches, it is difficult to understand it otherwise than as an allusion to those who had been buried under the falling slime, clay, and stones. Even poor men do not dwell under dung-hills, nor are they usually buried under them, and it is very possible that in transmission from generation to generation the original meaning was lost sight of. I should understand it to mean, "Go, O Lord, and search and bring back to life and comfort and wealth the millions thou hast slaughtered on the mountains, covering them with hills of slime and refuse."

And when we turn to the traditions of the kindred and more ancient race, the Toltecs,[1] we find that, after the fall of the fire from heaven, the people, emerging from the

[1. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 240.]

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seven caves, wandered _one hundred and four years_, "suffering from nakedness, hunger, and cold, over many lands, across expanses of sea, and through untold hardships," precisely as narrated in the foregoing pathetic prayer.

It tells of the migration of a race, over the desolated world, during the Age of Darkness. And we will find something, hereafter, very much like it, in the Book of Job.

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