The Toltecs possessed a deluge tradition, which we will notice hereafter, which unquestionably had reference to a very general and devastating flood; perhaps the scriptural one, but it is clear, as we think we have the authority to show, that the Cholula pyramid and its origin had no relation to that tradition, though so often confounded with it and the tower referred to by the Nahua chroniclers. The generally accepted origin of the pyramid is as follows: from the great cataclysm which destroyed the giants, seven of that race of monsters escaped by shutting themselves up in a mountain cavern. After the waters subsided, Xelhua, one of their number, went to Cholula and began the construction of this pyramid “to escape a second flood, should another occur,” according to Kingsborough, or as a “memorial of the mountain called Tlaloc which had sheltered him,” according to Pedro de los Rios. The bricks which were manufactured at the foot of the Sierra de Cocotl were transported to Cholula by being passed through the hands of a file of men extending between the two localities. But the angered gods seeing the presumption of mortals, smote both the tower and its architects with thunderbolts and stopped their work.[372] Lord Kingsborough so intimately connects the erection of the tower with the Toltec deluge legend as to derive Xelhua, the builder of the tower, from the Toltecs rather than from the race of giants, by claiming that he escaped from the deluge with Paticatle the Mexican Noah in an ark, and adds that when the tower was destroyed and the tongues of the builders confounded, Xelhua led a colony to the new world. This last will serve as a specimen of how the Cholula legend has been misunderstood and confounded with the tower of Babel. Father Duran in his MS.,[373] _Historia Antigua de la Nueva España_, 1585 A. D., quotes from the lips of a native of Cholula, over an hundred years old, a version of the legend which assigns quite a different object for building the Pyramid, one which shows that it never was erected as a memorial of Babel nor ever had any reference to an escape from any flood either past or in anticipation. It is as follows: “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; all was a plain without hill or elevation, encircled in every part by water without tree or created thing; and immediately after the light and the sun arose in the east, there appeared gigantic men of deformed stature, and possessed the land, who desiring to see the nativity of the sun as well as his occident, proposed to go and seek them. Dividing themselves into two parties, some journeyed toward the West and others toward the East; these travelled until the sea cut off their road, whereupon they determined to return to the place from which they started, and arriving at this place (Cholula), not finding the means of reaching the