In other words, let not the human race cease to be.

[1.  Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii, p. 46.]

{p. 217}

“It was thus they spake, living tranquilly, invoking the return of the light; waiting the rising of the sun; watching the star of the morning, precursor of the sun.  But no sun came, and the four men and their descendants grew uneasy.  ‘We have no person to watch over us,’ they said; ‘nothing to guard our symbols!’ Then they adopted gods of their own, and waited.  They kindled fires, for the climate was colder; then there fell great rains and hail-storms, and put out their fires.  Several times they made fires, and several times the rains and storms extinguished them.  Many other trials also they underwent in Tulan, famines and such things, and a general dampness and cold—­for the earth was moist, there being yet no sun.”

All this accords with what I have shown we might expect as accompanying the close of the so-called Glacial Age.  Dense clouds covered the sky, shutting out the light of the sun; perpetual rains and storms fell; the world was cold and damp, muddy and miserable; the people were wanderers, despairing and hungry.  They seem to have come from an eastern land.  We are told: 

“Tulan was a much colder climate than the happy eastern land they had left.”

Many generations seem to have grown up and perished under the sunless skies, “waiting for the return of the light”; for the “Popul Vuh” tells us that “here also the language of all the families was confused, so that no one of the first four men could any longer understand the speech of the others.”

That is to say, separation and isolation into rude tribes had made their tongues unintelligible to one another.

This shows that many, many years—­it may be centuries—­must have elapsed before that vast volume of moisture, carried up by evaporation, was able to fall

{p. 218}

back, in snow and rain to the land and sea, and allow the sun to shine through “the blanket of the dark.”  Starvation encountered the scattered fragments of mankind.

And in these same Quiche legends of Central America we are told: 

“The persons of the godhead were enveloped in the darkness which enshrouded a desolated world."[1]

They counseled together, and created four men of white and yellow maize (the white and yellow races?).  It was still dark; for they had no light but the light of the morning-star.  They came to Tulan.

And the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg gives further details of the Quiche legends: