"When now the funeral rites were over, a general council was held and arrangements made for collecting animal and vegetable food; for up to this time the {352} children and descendants of Ouiot had nothing to eat but a kind of white clay. And while they consulted together, behold a marvellous thing appeared before them, and they spoke to it, saying: 'Art thou our captain, Ouiot?' But the spectre said: 'Nay, for I am greater than Ouiot; my habitation is above, and my name is Chinigchinich.' Then he spoke further, having been told for what they were come together: 'I create all things, and I go now to make man, another people like unto you; as for you, I give you power, each after his kind, to produce all good and pleasant things. One of you shall bring rain, and another dew, and another make the acorn grow, and others other seeds, and yet others shall cause all kinds of game to abound in the land; and your children shall have this power for ever, and they shall be sorcerers to the men I go to create, and shall receive gifts of them, that the game fail not and the harvests be sure.' Then Chinigchinich made man; out of the clay of the lake he formed him, male and female; and the present Californians are the descendants of the one or more pairs there and thus created. "So ends the known tradition of the mountaineers; we must now go back and take up the story anew at its beginning, as told by the _playanos_, or people of the valley of San Juan Capistrano. These say that an invisible, all-powerful being, called Nocuma, made the world and all that it contains of things that grow and move. He made it round like a ball and held it in his hands, where it rolled about a good deal at first, till he steadied it by sticking a heavy black rock called Tosaut into it, as a kind of ballast. The sea was at this time only a little stream running round the world, and so crowded with fish that their twinkling fins had no longer room to move; so great was the press that {353} some of the more foolish fry were for effecting a landing and founding a colony upon the dry land, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that they were persuaded by their elders that the killing air and baneful sun and the want of feet must infallibly prove the destruction before many days of all who took part in such a desperate enterprise. The proper plan was evidently to improve and enlarge their present home; and to this end, principally by the aid of one very large fish, they broke the great rock Tosaut in two, finding a bladder in the centre filled with a very bitter substance. The taste of it pleased the fish, so they emptied it into the water, and instantly the water became salt and swelled up and overflowed a great part of the old earth, and made itself the new boundaries that remain to this day.