ed recesses the mythical
civilizers of Peru, the first of men, emerged, and in it during the time
of the flood, the remnants of the race escaped the fury of the
waves.[227-1] Viracocha himself is said to have dwelt there, though it
hardly needed this evidence to render it certain that this consecrated
cavern is but a localization of the general myth of the dawn rising from
the deep. It refers us for its prototype to the Aymara allegory of the
morning light flinging its beams like snow-white foam athwart the waves
of Lake Titicaca.

An ancient legend of the Aztecs derived their nation from a place called
Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caverns, located north of Mexico. Antiquaries
have indulged in all sorts of speculations as to what this means.
Sahagun explains it as a valley so named; Clavigero supposes it to have
been a city; Hamilton Smith, and after him Schoolcraft, construed
caverns to be a figure of speech for the _boats_ in which the early
Americans paddled across from Asia(!); the Abbe Brasseur confounds it
with Aztlan, and very many have discovered in it a distinct reference
to the fabulous "seven cities of Cibola" and the Casas Grandes, ruins of
large buildings of unburnt brick in the valley of the River Gila. From
this story arose the supposed sevenfold division of the Nahuas, a
division which never existed except in the imagination of Europeans.
When Torquemada adds that _seven_ hero gods ruled in Chicomoztoc and
were the progenitors of all its inhabitants, when one of them turns out
to be Xelhua, the giant who with six others escaped the flood by
ascending the mountain of Tlaloc in the terrestrial paradise and
afterwards built the pyramid of Cholula, and when we remember that in
one of the flood-myths _seven_ persons were said to have escaped the
waters, the whole narrative acquires a fabulous aspect that shuts it out
from history, and brands it as one of those fictions of the origin of
man from the earth so common to the race. Fictions yet truths; for
caverns and hollow trees were in fact the houses and temples of our
first parents, and from them they went forth to conquer and adorn the
world; and from the inorganic constituents of the soil acted on by
Light, touched by Divine Force, vivified by the Spirit, did in reality
the first of men proceed.

This cavern, which thus dimly lingered in the memories of nations,
occasionally expanded to a nether world, imagined to underlie this of
ours, and still inhabited by b