Such was the destiny, also, of the Mexican warriors, who daily climbed to the zenith by the sun's side with shouts of joy, and there resigned their charge to the celestial women, who had given their lives in childbed. Merchants, too, were in the procession, who had faced risk and peril and died upon their journeys. But this privilege tasted only four years, when they became birds of beautiful plumage in the celestial gardens. In the far East, in the abode of Tlaloc, god of waters, were those who had died by lightning or at sea, sufferers from various diseases, and children who had been sacrificed to the water-deities. These last, after a happy time, were born again; the rest passed in due course to the underworld of Mictlan in the far north, "a most obscure land, where light cometh not, and whence none can ever return." There the rich were still rich, and the slaves still slaves. But their term was short. Mictlan had nine divisions, and at the end of the fourth year the spirit reached the ninth and ceased to be. {235} This curious distribution has little moral significance, save for its recognition of valour, as in the Teutonic welcome of the warrior into Valhalla, or of social service, as in the case of those who give their lives for the community, the merchant like the Greenland whaler, or the mothers who did not survive their labour. But the beginnings of ethical discrimination sometimes present themselves in very much more simply organised communities. A rude social justice expresses itself in the belief of the Kaupuis of Assam that a murdered man shall have his murderer for his slave in the next life. The Chippeways predict that the souls of the wicked will be pursued by phantoms of the persons they have injured; and horses and dogs which have been ill-treated will torment their tormentors. Murder, theft, lying, adultery, draw down a singular chastisement in the Banks Islands. The spirits of the dead assemble on the road to Panoi, when each fresh comer is torn to pieces and put together again. Then the injured man has his chance. He seizes a part of the dismembered soul, so that it cannot be reconstructed, or at least suffers permanent mutilation. No judge presides over the process, no law regulates it; punishment is still a private affair. But the entry into the new life is not unconditional. The American Choctaws conceived their dead to journey to the east, till they reached the summit of a hill. There a long pine-trunk, {236} smooth and slippery, stretched over the river of death below to the next hill-top. The just passed over safely and entered paradise, the wicked fell off into the stream beneath. It was a self-acting test, which needed not the prior ordeal of the Avestan balance under Mithra and Rashnu at the Chinvat bridge (p. 9).