These gods built a temple on a high place, and laid out a garden, and waited patiently, offering sacrifices to the higher gods, wounding themselves with _flint_ knives, and "praying that it might seem good to them to shape the firmament, and _lighten the darkness_ of the world, and to establish the foundation of the earth; or, rather, to gather the waters together so that the earth might appear--as they had no place to rest in save only one little garden." Here we have the snakes and the people confounded together. The earth was afterward made fit for the use of mankind, and at a later date there came-- "A great deluge, wherein perished many of the sons and daughters that had been born to the gods; and it is said that, when the deluge was passed, the human race {p. 215} was restored, as at the first, and the Miztec kingdom populated, and the heavens and the earth established."[1] Father Duran, in his MS. "History Antique of New Spain," written in A. D. 1585, gives the Cholula legend, which commences: "In the beginning, _before the light of the sun_ had been created, this land was _in obscurity and darkness_ and void of any created thing." In the Toltec legends we read of a time when-- "There was a tremendous hurricane that carried away trees, mounds, houses, and the largest edifices, notwithstanding which many men and women escaped, _principally in caves_, and places where the great hurricane could not reach them. A few days having passed, they set out to see what had become of the earth, when they found it all populated with monkeys. All this time they were in darkness, _without seeing the light of the sun, nor the moon, that the wind had brought them_."[2] In the Aztec creation-myths, according to the accounts furnished by Mendieta, and derived from Fray Andres de Olmos, one of the earliest of the Christian missionaries among the Mexicans, we have the following legend of the "Return of the Sun": "_Now, there had been no sun in existence for many years;_ so the gods being assembled in a place called Teotihuacan, six leagues from Mexico, and gathered at the time _around a great fire_, told their devotees that he of them who should first cast himself into that, fire should have the honor of being transformed into a sun. So, one of them, called Nanahuatzin . . . flung himself into the fire. Then the gods" (the chiefs?) "began to peer through the gloom in all directions _for the expected light_, and to make bets as to what part of heaven. he should [1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, pp. 71-73. 2. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 239.] {p. 216} first appear in. Some said 'Here,' and some said 'There'; but when the sun rose they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east." In the long-continued darkness they had lost all knowledge of the cardinal points. The ancient landmarks, too, were changed.