The Stories of El Dorado

by Frona Eunice Wait

"Inasmuch as ye cannot praise us, neither call upon our names, your flesh shall be humiliated. It shall be broken with teeth. Ye shall be killed and eaten."

The first man was made of clay, but he was watery, had no strength and could not turn his head. His face looked one way all the time. He was given a language, but he had no intelligence, so he was consumed in water.

"Let us make an intelligent being who shall adore and invoke us," said the Thunderbolt and the Lightning Flash.

It was decided that a man should be made of wood and a woman of a kind of pith. They were made but the result was in no wise satisfactory. They moved about perfectly well it is true; they increased and multiplied and peopled the world with little wooden manikins like themselves, but the heart and intelligence were wanting. They had no memory of their Maker; they lived like the beasts and forgot the Heart of Heaven. They had neither blood nor substance, nor moisture nor fat. Their cheeks were shriveled; their feet and hands dried up.

Then was the Heart of Heaven very wroth, and he sent ruin and destruction upon these ingrates. He rained upon them night and day with a thick resin and the earth was all dark.

The men went mad with terror. They tried to mount up on the roofs, but the houses fell with them. They tried to climb the trees, but the trees shook them from their branches. They tried to hide in the caves and dens of the earth, but these closed against them.

Then their heads were cut off, and their bones broken and bruised, and their eyes picked out by the birds, and their flesh eaten by wild beasts.

Thus were they all devoted to chastisement and destruction save only a few who were preserved as memorials of the wooden men. These now exist in the forests as little apes.

In the night the gods counseled together again. "Of what shall we make man?" they said.

Then the Creator made four perfect men out of white and yellow corn. The name of the first one was The Tiger With the Sweet Smile, the second one was called The Tiger of the Night, the third one was The Distinguished Name, and the fourth was The Tiger of the Moon. They had neither father nor mother, but their coming into existence was a miracle wrought by the special intervention of Him who is pre-eminently the Creator.