That is to say, separation and isolation into rude tribes had made their tongues unintelligible to one another. This shows that many, many years--it may be centuries--must have elapsed before that vast volume of moisture, carried up by evaporation, was able to fall {p. 218} back, in snow and rain to the land and sea, and allow the sun to shine through "the blanket of the dark." Starvation encountered the scattered fragments of mankind. And in these same Quiche legends of Central America we are told: "The persons of the godhead were enveloped in the _darkness which enshrouded a desolated world_."[1] They counseled together, and created four men of white and yellow maize (the white and yellow races?). It was _still dark;_ for they had no light but the light of the morning-star. They came to Tulan. And the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg gives further details of the Quiche legends: Now, behold our ancients and our fathers were made lords, and _had their dawn_. Behold we will relate also the rising of the sun, the moon, and the stars! Great was their joy when they saw the morning-star, which came out first, with its resplendent face before the sun. _At last_ the sun itself began to come forth; the animals, small and great, were in joy; they rose from the water-courses and ravines, and stood on the mountain-tops, with their heads toward where the sun was coming. An innumerable crowd of people were there, and the dawn cast light on all these people at once. At last _the face of the ground was dried by the sun:_ like a man the sun showed himself, and his presence warmed and dried the surface of the ground. Before the sun appeared, _muddy and wet_ was the surface of the ground, and it was before the sun appeared, and then only the sun rose like a man. _But his heat had no strength_, and he _did but show when he rose;_ he only remained like" (an image in) "a mirror and it is not, indeed, the same sun that appears now, they say, in the stories."[2] [1. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 214. 2. Tylor's "Early History of Mankind," p. 308.] {p. 219} How wonderfully does all this accord with what we have shown would follow from the earth's contact with a comet! The earth is wet and covered with mud, the clay; the sun is long absent; at last he returns; he dries the mud, but his face is still covered with the remnants of the great cloud-belt; "his heat has no strength"; he shows himself only in glimpses; he shines through the fogs like an image in a mirror; he is not like the great blazing orb we see now.