smoke the sky?' At once Titlacahuan-Tezcatlipoca descended. He began to
chide, saying, 'Who has made this fire here?' And, seizing hold of the
fish, he shaped their loins and heads, and they were transformed into
dogs (chichime)."

Here we note a remarkable approximation to Plato's account of the
destruction of Atlantis. "In one day and one fatal night," says Plato,
"there came mighty earthquakes and inundations that ingulfed that
warlike people." "In a single day all was lost," says the Aztec legend.
And, instead of a rainfall of forty days and forty nights, as
represented in the Bible, here we see "in a single day. . . even the
mountains sunk into the water;" not only the land on which the people
dwelt who were turned into fish, but the very mountains of that land
sunk into the water. Does not this describe the fate of Atlantis? In the
Chaldean legend "the great goddess Ishtar wailed like a child," saying,
"I am the mother who gave birth to men, and, like to the race of fishes,
they are filling the sea."

In the account in Genesis, Noah "builded an altar unto the Lord, and
took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt
offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savor; and the Lord
said in his heart, 'I will not again curse the ground any more for man's
sake.'" In the Chaldean legend we are told that Khasisatra also offered
a sacrifice, a burnt offering, "and the gods assembled like flies above
the master of the sacrifice." But Bel came in a high state of
indignation, just as the Aztec god did, and was about to finish the work
of the Deluge, when the great god Ea took ''pity in his heart and
interfered to save the remnant of mankind.

These resemblances cannot be accidental; neither can they be the