my words to thee; I put myself in peril of falling into the gorge and cavern of this river. I, Lord, have come to take with my hands, blindness to mine eyes, rottenness and shriveling to my members, poverty and affliction to my body; for my meanness and rudeness this it is that I merit to receive. Live and rule for ever in all quietness and tranquillity, O thou that art our lord, our shelter, our protector, most compassionate, most pitiful, invisible, impalpable."
It is true that much of all this would apply to any great period of famine, but it appears that these events occurred when there was great cold in the country, when the people gathered around fires and could not get warm, a remarkable state of things in a country possessing as tropical a climate as Mexico. Moreover, these people were wanderers, "going by mountain and wilderness," seeking food, a whole nation of poverty-stricken, homeless, wandering paupers. And when we recur to the part where the priest tells the Lord to seek his friends and servants in the mountains, "below the dung-hills," and raise them to riches, it is difficult to understand it otherwise than as an allusion to those who had been buried under the falling slime, clay, and stones. Even poor men do not dwell under dung-hills, nor are they usually buried under them, and it is very possible that in transmission from generation to generation the original meaning was lost sight of. I should understand it to mean, "Go, O Lord, and search and bring back to life and comfort and wealth the millions thou hast slaughtered on the mountains, covering them with hills of slime and refuse."
And when we turn to the traditions of the kindred and more ancient race, the Toltecs,[1] we find that, after the fall of the fire from heaven, the people, emerging from the
[1. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 240.]
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seven caves, wandered one hundred and four years, "suffering from nakedness, hunger, and cold, over many lands, across expanses of sea, and through untold hardships," precisely as narrated in the foregoing pathetic prayer.
It tells of the migration of a race, over the desolated world, during the Age of Darkness. And we will find something, hereafter, very much like it, in the Book of Job.
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