Thither direct thy steps, Laillah being set aside.’
Mr. Jonathan Rigg had lived ten years among these people, and knew them well, yet had never found out that their paradise was on this mountain. When at last he heard of it, he made the ascent, finding on the top only a few river-stones, forming one of the balai, or sacred cairns, common in the district. But the popular belief, that a tiger would devour the chiefs who permitted a violation of the sacred place, soon received the sort of confirmation which such beliefs receive everywhere, for a tiger killed two children a few days later, and the disaster was of course ascribed to Mr. Rigg’s profanation.[[143]] The Chilians said that the soul goes westward over the sea to Gulcheman, the dwelling-place of the dead beyond the mountains; life, some said, was all pleasure there, but others thought that part would be happy and part miserable.[[144]] Hidden among the mountains of Mexico lay the joyous garden-land of Tlalocan, where maize, and pumpkins, and chilis, and tomatos never failed, and where abode the souls of children sacrificed to Tlaloc, its god, and the souls of such as died by drowning or thunderstroke, or by leprosy or dropsy, or other acute disease.[[145]] A survival of such thought may be traced into mediæval civilization, in the legends of the Earthly Paradise, the fire-girt abode of saints not yet raised to highest bliss, localized in the utmost East of Asia, where earth stretches up towards heaven.[[146]] When Columbus sailed west-ward across the Atlantic to seek ‘the new heaven and the new earth’ he had read of in Isaiah, he found them, though not as he sought. It is a quaint coincidence that he found there also, though not as he sought it, the Earthly Paradise which was another main object of his venturous quest. The Haitians described to the white men their Coaibai, the paradise of the dead, in the lovely Western valleys of their island, where the souls hidden by day among the cliffs came down at night to feed on the delicious fruit of the mamey-trees, of which the living ate but sparingly, lest the souls of their friends should want.[[147]]
Secondly, there are Australians who think that the spirit of the dead hovers awhile on earth and goes at last toward the setting sun, or westward over the sea to the island of souls, the home of his fathers. Thus these rudest savages have developed two thoughts which we meet with again and again far onward in the course of culture—the thought of an island of the dead, and the thought that the world of departed souls is in the West, whither the Sun descends at evening to his daily death.[[148]] Among the North American Indians, when once upon a time an Algonquin hunter left his body behind and visited the land of souls in the sunny south, he saw before him beautiful trees and plants, but found he could walk right through them. Then he paddled in the canoe of white shining stone across the lake where wicked souls perish in the storm, till he reached the beautiful and happy island where there is no cold, no war, no bloodshed, but the creatures run happily about, nourished by the air they breathe.[[149]] Tongan legend says that, long ago, a canoe returning from Fiji was driven by stress of weather to Bolotu, the island of gods and souls lying in the ocean north-west of Tonga. That island is larger than all theirs together, full of all finest fruits and loveliest flowers, that fill the air with fragrance, and come anew the moment they are plucked; birds of beauteous plumage are there, and hogs in plenty, all immortal save when killed for the gods to eat, and then new living ones appear immediately to fill their places. But when the hungry crew of the canoe landed, they tried in vain to pluck the shadowy bread-fruit, they walked through unresisting trees and houses, even as the souls of chiefs who met them walked unchecked through their solid bodies. Counselled to hasten home from this land of no earthly food, the men sailed to Tonga, but the deadly air of Bolotu had infected them, and they soon all died.[[150]]
Such ideas took strong hold on classic thought, in the belief in a paradise in the Fortunate Islands of the far Western Ocean. Hesiod in the ‘Works and Days’ tells of the half-gods of the Fourth Age, between the Age of Bronze and the Age of Iron. When death closed on this heroic race, Zeus granted them at the ends of Earth a life and home, apart from man and far from the immortals. There Kronos reigns over them, and they dwell careless in the Islands of the Happy, beside deep-eddying Ocean—blest heroes, for whom the grain-giving field bears, thrice blooming yearly, the honey-sweet fruit:—
‘Ἔνθ’ ἤτοι τοὺς μὲν θανάτου τέλος ἀμφεκάλυψε·
Τοîς δὲ δίχ’ ἀνθρώπον βίοτον καὶ ἤθἐ ὀπάσσας
Ζεὺς Κρονίδες κατένασσε πατήρ ἐς πείρατα γαίες,
Τηλοὐ ἀπ’ ἀθανάτον· τοῖσιν Κρόνος ἐμβασιλεύει·
Καὶ τοὶ μὲν ναίουσιν ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες
Ἐν μακάρον νήσοισι παρ’ Ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνεν,