Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 11 (Latin American).djvu/61

Rh great veneration, having it all painted "without any figure, but with leaves and the like"; and keeping in it two stone zemis which looked "as if they sweated"; to these they went when they wanted rain.

The story of the origin of the sea is a little more complex. In Introducing the tale, Fray Ramon says: "I, writing in haste and not having paper enough, could not place everything rightly. . . . Let us now return to what we should have said first, that is, their opinion concerning the origin and beginning of the sea." There was a certain man, Glala, whose son, Giaiael ("Giaia's son"), undertook to kill his father, but was himself slain by the parent, who put the bones into a calabash, which he hung in the top of his house. One day he took the calabash down, and looking into it, an abundance of fishes, great and small, came forth, since into these the bones had changed. Later on, while Giaia was absent, there came to his house four sons, born at a birth from a certain woman, Itiba Tahuvava, who was cut open that they might be delivered—"the first that they cut out was Caracaracol, that is, 'Mangy.'" These four brothers took the calabash and ate of the fish, but seeing Giaia returning, in their haste they replaced it badly, with the result that "there ran so much water from it as overflowed all the country, and with it came out abundance offish, and hence they believe the sea had its origin." Fray Ramon goes on to tell how, the four brothers being hungry, one of them begged cassaba bread of a certain man, but was struck by him with tobacco. Thereupon his shoulder swelled up painfully; and when it was opened, a live female tortoise issued forth—"so they built their house and bred up the tortoise."

"I understood no more of this matter, and what we have writ signifies but little, " continues the friar; yet to the modern reader the tales have all the marks of a primitive cosmogony, a cosmogony having many analogues in similar tales from the two Americas. The notion of a cave or caves from which