14 Singing Valleys 



up their devotions to Coatlicue and Cinteotl, protesting that 

 if they forgot these older divinities there might be no harvest. 



With all these tales in mind, Linnaeus sought for a Greek 

 word which would tell the story. He found zea, which means 

 ''the cause of life." His pen wrote it down. It was one way of 

 saying what the various Indian names for the maize implied. 

 Zea mays. That said it. That linked the old world and the new. 

 It gave the new world's grain the dignity of classic tradition; 

 and it also kept the memory of a race of copper-colored men 

 who built, out of the maize, a civilization which antedated 

 that of Western Europe. 



Zea mays ... it might even be translated, "That which 

 caused the Maya to live." 



"The destiny of nations," said Brillat-Savarin, "depends on 

 the way they nourish themselves." 



The history of the peoples of the three Americas is the story 

 of a civilization which was cornfed from its beginnings. 



Let us look at those beginnings. 



Of all the lost peoples of antiquity none so stirs the imagina- 

 tion as do the Maya. Remnants of their amazing civilization 

 lie in the tangled jungles of Guatemala and in the thorny 

 scrub of Yucatan. What more may lie below the waters of the 

 Caribbean and the Pacific is surmise. Under the jungle floor 

 of Guatemala are to be found traces of ancient roads which 

 come up out of one sea, cross the isthmus, to be lost again 

 under the further waters. The isthmus as it is today is only the 

 serpentine backbone of a country that once was; a skeleton 

 from which the seas have licked away the flesh. 



Certainly the story of a prehistoric continent shattered by a 

 series of earthquakes and finally submerged under the sea, the 

 waters of which were turned to mud so that no ship could pass 

 through them, appears too frequently and too widely to be 

 dismissed as pure fantasy. One of the treasures of the British 

 Museum is a roll of parchment painted with hieroglyphics by 

 Mayan scribes, no one knows how many centuries ago. It de- 



