rain, clouds, thunder and lightning. But it is
essentially and pre-eminently the symbol of rain; and the god who
controls the rain, Chac of the Mayas, Tlaloc of the Aztecs, carried the
axe and the thunderbolt like his homologues and prototypes in the Old
World. In America also we find reproduced in full, not only the legends
of the antagonism between the thunder-bird and the serpent, but also
the identification of these two rivals in one composite monster, which,
as I have already mentioned, is seen in the winged disks, both in the
Old World and the New.[149] Hardly any incident in the history of the
Egyptian falcon or the thunder-birds of Babylonia, Greece or India,
fails to reappear in America and find pictorial expression in the Maya
and Aztec codices.

[Illustration: Fig. 13.

A photographic reproduction of the 36th page of the Dresden Maya Codex.

Of the three pictures in the top row one represents the elephant-headed
god _Chac_ with a snake's body. He is pouring out rain. The central
picture represents the lightning animal carrying fire down from heaven
to earth. On the right _Chac_ is shown in human guise carrying
thunder-weapons in the form of burning torches.

In the second row a goddess sits in the rain: her head is prolonged into
that of a bird, holding a fish in its beak. The central picture shows
_Chac_ in his boat ferrying a woman across the water from the East. The
third illustration depicts the familiar conflict between the vulture and
serpent.

In the third row _Chac_ is seen with his axe: in the central picture he
is standing in the water looking up towards a rain-cloud; and on the
right he is shown sitting in a hut resting from his labours.]

What makes America such a rich storehouse of historical data is the fact
that it is stretched across the world almost from pole to pole; and for
many centuries the jetsam and flotsam swept on to this vast strand has
made it a museum of the cultural history of the Old World, much of which
would have been lost for ever if America had not saved it. But a record
preserved in this manner is necessarily in a highly confused state. For
essentially the same materials reached America in manifold forms. The
original immigrants into America brought from North-Eastern Asia such
cultural equipment as had reached the area east of the Yenesei at the
time when Europe was in the Neolithic phase of culture. Then when
ancient mariners began to coast along the Eastern Asiatic