few days later, and the disaster was of course ascribed to Mr. Rigg's profanation.[1] The Chilians said that the soul goes westward over the sea to Gulcheman, the dwelling-place of the dead beyond the mountains; life, some said, was all pleasure there, but others thought that part would be happy and part miserable.[2] Hidden among the mountains of Mexico lay the joyous garden-land of Tlalocan, where maize, and pumpkins, and chilis, and tomatos never failed, and where abode the souls of children sacrificed to Tlaloc, its god, and the souls of such as died by drowning or thunderstroke, or by leprosy or dropsy, or other acute disease.[3] A survival of such thought may be traced into mediæval civilization, in the legends of the Earthly Paradise, the fire-girt abode of saints not yet raised to highest bliss, localized in the utmost East of Asia, where earth stretches up towards heaven.[4] When Columbus sailed westward across the Atlantic to seek 'the new heaven and the new earth' he had read of in Isaiah, he found them, though not as he sought. It is a quaint coincidence that he found there also, though not as he sought it, the Earthly Paradise which was another main object of his venturous quest. The Haitians described to the white men their Coaibai, the paradise of the dead, in the lovely Western valleys of their island, where the souls hidden by day among the cliffs came down at night to feed on the delicious fruit of the mamey-trees, of which the living ate but sparingly, lest the souls of their friends should want.[5]
Secondly, there are Australians who think that the spirit of the dead hovers awhile on earth and goes at last toward
- ↑ St. John, 'Far East,' vol. i. p. 278. Rigg, in 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iv. p. 119. See also Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 397; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 83; Irving, 'Astoria,' p. 142.
- ↑ Molina, 'Chili,' vol. ii. p. 89.
- ↑ Brasseur, 'Mexique,' vol. iii. p. 496; Sahagun, iii. App. c. 2, x. c. 29; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 5.
- ↑ See 'Wright, l.c. &c.; Alger, p. 391; &c.
- ↑ 'History of Colon,' ch. 61; Pet. Martyr. Dec. i. lib. ix.; Irving, 'Life of Columbus,' vol. ii. p. 121.
