Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/367

Rh when their companions called to them through the darkness, 'Leap! leap! the sky is on its way down,' they looked up and saw it descending, but paralyzed by fear they sprang so feebly that they only reached the other side with their hands, and the sky at the same moment striking violently on the earth with a terrible sound, forced them into the dreadful black abyss. Lastly, in the funeral ritual of the Aztecs there is found a like description of the first peril that the shade, had to encounter on the road leading to that subterranean Land of the Dead, which the sun lights when it is night on earth. Giving the corpse the first of the passports that were to carry him safe to his journey's end, the survivors said to him, 'With these you will pass between the two mountains that smite one against the other.' On the suggestion of this group of solar conceptions and that of Maui's death, we may perhaps explain as derived from a broken-down fancy of solar myth that famous episode of Greek legend, where the good ship Argo passed between the Symplêgades, those two huge cliffs that opened and closed again with swift and violent collision. Can any effort of baseless fancy have brought into the poet's mind a thought so quaint in itself, yet so fitting with the Karen and Aztec myths of the gates of Night and Death? With the Maori legend, the Argonautic tale has a yet deeper coincidence. In both the event is to determine the future; but this thought is worked out in two converse ways. If Maui passed through