The name, or one of the names, of this benefactor was Condoy, the meaning of which my facilities do not enable me to ascertain.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Juan B. Carriedo, Estudios Historicos y Estadisticos del Estado Libre de Oaxaca, p. 3 (Oaxaca, 1847).]

There is scarcely enough of this to reveal the exact lineaments of their hero; but if we may judge from these fragments as given by Carriedo, it appears to be of precisely the same class as the other hero-myths I have collected in this volume.  Historians of authority assure us that the Mixes, Zoques and Zapotecs united in the expectation, founded on their ancient myths and prophecies, of the arrival, some time, of men from the East, fair of hue and mighty in power, masters of the lightning, who would occupy the land.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., p. 94, note, quoting from the works of Las Casas and Francisco Burgoa.]

On the lofty plateau of the Andes, in New Granada, where, though nearly under the equator, the temperature is that of a perpetual spring, was the fortunate home of the Muyscas.  It is the true El Dorado of America; every mountain stream a Pactolus, and every hill a mine of gold.  The natives were peaceful in disposition, skilled in smelting and beating the precious metal that was everywhere at hand, lovers of agriculture, and versed in the arts of spinning, weaving and dying cotton.  Their remaining sculptures prove them to have been of no mean ability in designing, and it is asserted that they had a form of writing, of which their signs for the numerals have alone been preserved.

The knowledge of these various arts they attributed to the instructions of a wise stranger who dwelt among them many cycles before the arrival of the Spaniards.  He came from the East, from the llanos of Venezuela or beyond them, and it was said that the path he made was broad and long, a hundred leagues in length, and led directly to the holy temple at his shrine at Sogamoso.  In the province of Ubaque his footprints on the solid rock were reverently pointed out long after the Conquest.  His hair was abundant, his beard fell to his waist, and he dressed in long and flowing robes.  He went among the nations of the plateaux, addressing each in its own dialect, taught them to live in villages and to observe just laws.  Near the village of Coto was a high hill held in special veneration, for from its prominent summit he was wont to address the people who gathered round its base.  Therefore it was esteemed a sanctuary, holy to the living and the dead.  Princely families from a distance carried their dead there to be interred, because this teacher had said that man does not perish when he dies, but shall rise again.  It was held that this would be more certain to occur in the very spot where he announced this doctrine.  Every sunset, when he had finished his discourse, he retired into a cave in the mountain, not to reappear again until the next morning.