Page:The Story of Mexico.djvu/54

22 The distant home of which they all preserved the legend under one name or another, one of which was Aztlan, the musical title given it by the Mexicans, was, perhaps, Atlantis, the broad and mighty realm where mankind in its childhood lived for generations in tranquillity and happiness. Huehue-Tlapallan, Aztlan, Atlantis, these names represent the universal tradition of this early home. The world before the Deluge, the Garden of Eden, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields, Olympus, Asgard,—all these are but different terms to express the vague vision in men's minds of a happy past. If the theory of Atlantis could be true, these were not mere visions but traditions preserving a consistent recollection of real historical events, of a populous and mighty cradle of nations which peopled the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi, the Amazon, and the Pacific coasts of South America, as well as the older world.

Atlantis, according to the story, perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sank into the ocean with nearly all its inhabitants. Only a few persons escaped in ships and rafts to lands east and west of the catastrophe. Each of these separate survivors became, in the legend of his descendants, the solitary Noah or Coxcox of a tradition representing the destruction of an entire world. The Nahuatl legend helps out the theory of Atlantis to willing minds. The Noah of the Mexican tribes was Coxcox, who, with his wife Xochi-quetzal, alone escaped the deluge. They took refuge in the hollow trunk of a cypress (ahuehuete),