y gods.[92-2] A floe of ice in the Arctic Sea was the home of
the guardian spirit of the Algonkins;[92-3] on a mountain near the north
star the Dakotas thought Heyoka dwelt who rules the seasons; and the
realm of Mictla, the Aztec god of death, lay where the shadows pointed.
From that cheerless abode his sceptre reached over all creatures, even
the gods themselves, for sooner or later all must fall before him. The
great spirit of the dead, said the Ottawas, lives in the dark
north,[93-1] and there, in the opinion of the Monquis of California,
resided their chief god, Gumongo.[93-2]

Unfortunately the makers of vocabularies have rarely included the words
north, south, east, and west, in their lists, and the methods of
expressing these ideas adopted by the Indians can only be partially
discovered. The east and west were usually called from the rising and
setting of the sun as in our words orient and occident, but occasionally
from traditional notions. The Mayas named the west the greater, the east
the lesser debarkation; believing that while their culture hero Zamna
came from the east with a few attendants, the mass of the population
arrived from the opposite direction.[93-3] The Aztecs spoke of the east
as "the direction of Tlalocan," the terrestrial paradise. But for north
and south there were no such natural appellations, and consequently the
greatest diversity is exhibited in the plans adopted to express them.
The north in the Caddo tongue is "the place of cold," in Dakota "the
situation of the pines," in Creek "the abode of the (north) star," in
Algonkin "the home of the soul," in Aztec "the direction of Mictla" the
realm of death, in Quiche and Quichua, "to the right hand;"[93-4] while
for the south we find such terms as in Dakota "the downward direction,"
in Algonkin "the place of warmth," in Quiche "to the left hand," while
among the Eskimos, who look in this direction for the sun, its name
implies "before one," just as does the Hebrew word _kedem_, which,
however, this more southern tribe applied to the east.

We can trace the sacredness of the number four in other curious and
unlooked-for developments. Multiplied into the number of the
fingers--the arithmetic of every child and ignorant man--or by adding
together the first four members of its arithmetical series (4 + 8 + 12 +
16), it gives the number forty. This was taken as a limit to the sacred
dances of some Indian tribes, and by others as the highest number