It is true that much of all this would apply to any great period of
famine, but it appears that these events occurred when there was
great cold in the country, when the people gathered around fires and
could not get warm, a remarkable state of things in a country
possessing as tropical a climate as Mexico. Moreover, these people
were wanderers, "going by mountain and wilderness," seeking food, a
whole nation of poverty-stricken, homeless, wandering paupers. And
when we recur to the part where the priest tells the Lord to seek his
friends and servants in the mountains, "below the dung-hills," and
raise them to riches, it is difficult to understand it otherwise than
as an allusion to those who had been buried under the falling slime,
clay, and stones. Even poor men do not dwell under dung-hills, nor
are they usually buried under them, and it is very possible that in
transmission from generation to generation the original meaning was
lost sight of. I should understand it to mean, "Go, O Lord, and
search and bring back to life and comfort and wealth the millions
thou hast slaughtered on the mountains, covering them with hills of
slime and refuse."

And when we turn to the traditions of the kindred and more ancient
race, the Toltecs,[1] we find that, after the fall of the fire from
heaven, the people, emerging from the

[1. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 240.]

{p. 232}

seven caves, wandered _one hundred and four years_, "suffering from
nakedness, hunger, and cold, over many lands, across expanses of sea,
and through untold hardships," precisely as narrated in the foregoing