The account which the _Popol Vuh_ furnishes of the migrations of the ancient Quichés is somewhat confused, and it is scarcely possible to hope that the locations named should ever be fully identified. Their worship was at first purely spiritual. “Only they gazed up into heaven, not knowing what they had come so far to do.” In their original home, wherever that might have been, they grew weary of this kind of service—of watching for “the rising of the sun”—by which it seems they meant the coming of temporal power. The four men then forsook their abode and journeyed to Tulan-Zuiva, the seven caves or seven ravines. Here they found gods; to each of the four men a different deity was assigned. To Balam-Quitzé the god Tohil was given; to Balam-Agab the god Avilix; and to Mahucutah, the god Hacavitz; and though the fourth man Iqi-Balam also received a god, no special account is taken of him, since the latter of the four men left no progeny. The journey to Tulan is said to have been a very long one. Doubtless in this account we have an allusion to one of those modifications in religious notions which seems to have often attended a change of residence in early times. The abstract worship of the Creator is supplanted by the more material and ceremonial worship of intermediate deities (demi-gods). Tulan is described as a much colder climate than the eastern and tropical land which they had forsaken, and the god Tohil came to their relief by the creation of fire. But incessant rains, accompanied with hail, extinguished all their fires, which were again kindled repeatedly by the fire-god. Tulan was an unfavorable locality for permanent abode—rains, extreme cold, dampness, famine prevailed, and the peculiar misfortune of the confusion of tongues there befell them. No longer were the brother propagators of the race able to communicate with each other. “At Tulan there was as yet no sun,” is the significant but perplexing language of the narrative. At last Tulan, the mysterious land of the “seven-caves,” was forsaken, and under the leadership of Tohil the people began a migration which was attended with indescribable hardships and famine itself. Their way led through dense forests, over high mountains, a long sea passage, and by a rough and pebbly shore. We are, however, told that the sea was parted for their passage. Their tribulations were at an end when at last they arrived at a beautiful mountain, which they named after their god Hacavitz. Here they were informed that the sun would appear, and, as a consequence, the four progenitors of the race and all the people rejoiced. Here was everything beauteous and gladdening. The morning star shed forth a resplendent brightness, and the sun itself at last appeared, though then it had not the warmth which it possessed at a later day. Before the light of the sun, however, the gods Tohil, Avilix and Hacavitz, together with the tiger and lion and reptiles, were changed into stone.