great care to preserve in
the cemeteries of the dead the nails and hair which had been cut
off, they replied that in the day of resurrection the dead would
come forth with whatever of their bodies was left, and there would
be too great a press of business in that day for them to afford
time to go hunting round after their hair and nails.15 The fancy
of a Christian is too plain here. If the answer were really made
by the natives, they were playing a joke on their credulous
questioner, or seeking to please him with distorted echoes of his
own faith.

The conceits as to a future life entertained by the Mexicans
varied considerably from those of their neighbors of Peru. Souls
neither good nor bad, or whose virtues and vices balanced each
other, were to enter a medium state of idleness and empty content.
The wicked, or those dying in any of certain enumerated modes of
death, went to Mictlan, a dismal hell within the earth. The souls
of those struck by lightning, or drowned, or dying by any of a
given list of diseases, also the souls of children, were
transferred to a remote elysium, Tlalocan. There was a place in
the chief temple where, it was supposed, once a year the spirits
of all the children who had been sacrificed to Tlaloc invisibly
came and assisted in the ceremonies. The ultimate heaven was
reserved for warriors who bravely fell in battle, for women who
died in labor, for those offered up in the temples of the gods,
and for a few others. These passed immediately to the house of the
sun, their chief god, whom they accompanied for a term of years,
with songs, dances, and revelry, in his circuit around the sky.
Then, animating the forms of birds of gay plumage, they lived as
beautiful songsters among the flowers, now on earth, now in
heaven, at their pleasure.16 It was the Mexican custom to dress
the dead man in the garb appropriated to the guardian deity of his
craft or condition in life. They gave him a jug of water. They
placed with him slips of paper to serve as passports through
guarded gates and perilous defiles in the other world. They made a
fire of his clothes and utensils, to warm the shivering soul while
traversing a region of cold winds beyond the grave.17 The
following sentence occurs in a poem composed by one of the old
Aztec monarchs: "Illustrious nobles, loyal subjects, let us aspire
to that heaven where all is eternal and corruption cannot come.
The horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun