The water ceremonies in Catlin's account have already been sufficiently adverted to. He thus describes the medicine or mystery lodge in which they took place. Exteriorly, with the exception of the four images, it differed only in dimensions from the other wigwams, which are thus described? "They were covered with earth. They were all of one form; the frames or shells constructed of timbers, and covered with a thatching of willow boughs, and over and on that with a foot or two in thickness of a concrete of tough clay and gravel, which became so hard as to admit the whole group of inmates to recline on _their tops_. They varied in size from thirty to sixty feet, and _were perfectly round_." For extract describing _interior_, _vide supra_, p. 257, noting (_vide_ Plate iii. in Catlin) the four human and four ox _skulls_; "the sacks of water in the form of large _tortoises_ lying on their backs." _N.B._--With reference to the tortoise, _vide ante_ p. 257. Compare the "Buddhist Topes" in Major Cunningham's "Bhilsa Tope," _vide_ p. 243. HUNTER. Hunter ("Annals of Rural Bengal," p. 153) says of the Santals: "The only stream of any consequence in their present country--the Damouda--is regarded with a veneration altogether disproportionate to its size. Thither the superstitious Santal repairs to consult the prophets and diviners, and once a year the tribes make a pilgrimage to its banks in commemoration of their forefathers.... However remote the jungle in which the Santal may die, his nearest kinsman carries a little relic of the deceased to the river, and places it in the current to be conveyed to the far-off eastern land from which his ancestors came." In connection with the above, it must be remembered (_vide_ Appendix G, p. 480, "Santal Traditions") that they have, although confused with the Creation, an unmistakable tradition of the Deluge, the intoxication of Noah, and the dispersion. If, then, I have shown that the custom, for the preservation of which from oblivion, so far as the Mandans (now extinct) are concerned, we are indebted to Mr Catlin, and which so plainly tells its own tale, is common to Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as America, I shall have established it as a tradition, not of a local American, but of an universal Deluge; and if the tradition of the universal Deluge is proved, then, according to Mr Catlin's narrative itself, there is tradition of the Creation also (_vide_ pp. 7, 13, 42).[220]