Page:Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx.djvu/94

 origin in that of the country they inhabited, a place situated in the northern tropical parts of the Western Continent, in that "Land of Kui," that mysterious home of their ancestors, where the Egyptians thought the souls of their departed friends went to dwell, which was known to its inhabitants as Mayach, a word that in their language meant the "first land," the "land just sprouted," also the "hard land," the "terra firma," as we learn from the sign  of aspiration, hardness, coagulation, placed each side of the body of the calabash, to indicate, perhaps, the rocky formation of its soil, and that it had withstood the awful cataclysms which swept from the face of the earth the Land of Mu  and many other places with their populations. The priests of Egypt, Chaldea, and India preserved the remembrance of their destruction in the archives of their temples, as did those of Mayach on the other side of the ocean.

The latter did not content themselves with recording the relation in their treatises on geology and history, but in order to preserve its memory for future generations they caused it to be carved on a stone tablet which they fastened to the wall in one of the apartments of their college at Chicħen, where it is yet seen. The natives have perpetuated, from generation to generation, for centuries, the name of that inscription. They still call it Akab-ɔib, the awful, the tenebrous writing.