He entrusted to their guardianship the sacred fire, [and it was at Pecos, before disappearing from their sight, that] he planted a tree upside down and bade them watch it well, for when that tree should fall and the fire die out, then he would return from the far East, and lead his royal people to victory and power. When the present generations saw their land glide, mile by mile, into the rapacious hands of the Yankee, when new and strange diseases desolated their homes, finally when in 1846 the sacred tree was prostrated, and the guardian of the holy fire was found dead on its ashes, then they thought the hour of deliverance had come, and every morning at earliest dawn a watcher mounted to the house-tops, and gazed long and anxiously in the lightening east, hoping to descry the noble form of Montezuma advancing through the morning beams at the head of a conquering army.[190] A variation of the deluge myth was told me at Isleta. The people there believe that this continent was never overtaken by the great flood, and that consequently the American Indian is in descent from the oldest race that has had a continuous existence upon earth. In the summer of 1922 some fragments of this myth were told me by my host at the Rito de los Frijoles, who had been shown “a very ancient manuscript by an aged Indian, who had spent two days” in relating to him the Montezuma legend, which the Indian affirmed had no connection with the Aztec king of the same name. We also meet among these American aborigines a world-wide myth which is probably most familiar in the Minotaur, or in the legend of St. George, who rescued the Libyan princess when she was chosen by lot to feed the terrible dragon outside her father’s city, and who remained to convert that heathen people to Christianity. Professor Espinosa[191] found among the Pueblos a myth of the Monster Viper which he is inclined to believe is purely Indian in origin—probably derived from the Aztec. He says that the Indians were very vague about it, or wished to deny it; but the legend is that in each pueblo is hidden a monster viper to which several children are fed every year. In New Mexico the belief is said to be widespread that the gradual extinction of the Pueblo tribes there is due to the fact that child-sacrifice no longer exists. Professor Espinosa has reason to believe that it was at some time a common practice.[192] Mrs. Stevenson no later than 1886 believed that she discovered that in at least two Tewa pueblos the rattlesnake was propitiated by human sacrifice, either of the youngest female, or failing this, of an adult woman who had neither husband nor children—if such could be found.