“Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright
        sky
  Was not, nor heaven’s broad roof outstretched
        above. 
  What covered all?  What sheltered?  What
        concealed? 
  Was it the waters’ fathomless abyss? 
  There was not death,—­yet was there nought
        immortal. 
  There was no confine betwixt day and night. 
  The only One breathed breathless by itself;—­
  Other than it there nothing since has been. 
  Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
  In gloom profound,—­an ocean without light. 
  The germ that still lay covered in the husk
  Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent
        heat.”]

The legend then pictures a council between these “Fathers” and the Supreme Creator; after which, the word is spoken, and the earth bursts forth from the darkness, with its great mountains and forests and animals and birds, as they might to a voyager approaching the shore.  An episode occurs, describing a deluge, but still bearing in it the traces of the double tradition,—­the one referring to some primeval catastrophe, and the other to a local inundation, which had perhaps surprised the first legislators in the midst of their efforts.  The Mexican tradition (Codex Chimalpopoca) shows more distinctly the united action of the Mediator (Quetzalcohuatl) and the Deity:—­“From ashes had God created man and animated him, and they say it is Quetzalcohuatl who hath perfected him who had been made, and hath breathed into him, on the seventh day, the breath of life.”

Another legend, after describing the creation of men of wood, and women of cibak, (the marrow of the corn-flag,) tells us that “the fathers and the children, from want of intelligence, did not use the language which they had received to praise the benefaction of their creation, and never thought of raising their eyes to praise Hurakan.  Then were they destroyed in an inundation.  There descended from heaven a rain of bitumen and resin...  And on account of them, the earth was obscured; and it rained night and day.  And men went and came, out of themselves, as if struck with madness.  They wished to mount upon the roofs, and the houses fell beneath them; when they took refuge in the caves and the grottoes, these closed over them.  This was their punishment and destruction.”—­Vol.  I. p. 55.

In the Mexican tradition, instead of the rain we find a violent eruption of the volcanoes, and men are changed into fishes, and again into chicime,—­which may designate the barbarian tribes that invaded Central America.