LEGENDS OF THE CAVE-LIFE.

I HAVE shown that man could only have escaped the fire, the poisonous gases, and the falling stones and clay-dust, by taking refuge in the water or in the deep caves of the earth.

And hence everywhere in the ancient legends we find the races claiming that they came up out of the earth.  Man was earth-born.  The Toltecs and Aztecs traced back their origin to “the seven caves.”  We have seen the ancestors of the Peruvians emerging from the primeval cave, Pacarin-Tampu; and the Aztec Nanahuatzin taking refuge in a cave; and the ancestors of the Yurucares, the Takahlis, and the Mbocobi of America, all biding themselves from the conflagration in a cave; and we have seen the tyrannical and cruel race of the Tahoe legend buried in a cave.  And, passing to a far-distant region, we find the Bungogees and Pankhoos, Hill tribes, of the most ancient races of Chittagong, in British India, relating that “their ancestors came out of a cave in the earth, under the guidance of a chief named Tlandrokpah."[1]

We read in the Toltec legends that a dreadful hurricane visited the earth in the early age, and carried away trees, mounds, horses, etc., and the people escaped by seeking safety in caves and places where the great hurricane

[1.  Captain Lewin, “The Hill Tribes of Chittagong” p. 95, 1869.]

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could not reach them.  After a few days they came forth “to see what had become of the earth, when they found it all populated with monkeys.  All this time they were in darkness, without the light of the sun Or the moon, which the wind had brought them."[1]

A North American tribe, a branch of the Tinneh of British America, have a legend that “the earth existed first in a chaotic state, with only one human inhabitant, a woman, who dwelt in a cave and lived on berries.”  She met one day a mysterious animal, like a dog, who transformed himself into a handsome young man, and they became the parents of a giant race."[2]

There seems to be an allusion to the cave-life in Ovid, where, detailing the events that followed soon after the creation, he says: 

“Then for the first time did the parched air glow with sultry heat, and the ice, bound up by the winds, was pendent.  Then for the first time did men enter houses; those houses were caverns, and thick shrubs, and twigs fastened together with bark."[3]

But it is in the legends of the Navajo Indians of North America that we find the most complete account of the cave-life.

It is as follows: 

“The Navajos, living north of the Pueblos, say that at one time all the nations, Navajos, Pueblos, Coyoteros, and white people, lived together tinder ground, in the heart of a mountain, near the river San Juan. Their food was meat, which they had in abundance, for all kinds of game were closed up with them in their cave; but their light was dim, and only endured for a few hours each day.  There were, happily, two dumb men among the Navajos, flute-players,