486 ANTIQUITY OF BACES. 





It was one of those calm and serene nights which are so 

 cc -mon in the torrid zone. The stars shone with a mild 

 and planetary light. Their scintillation was scarcely sen- 

 sible at the horizon, which seemed illumined by the great 

 nebula? of the southern hemisphere. An innumerable mul- 

 titude of insects spread a reddish light upon the ground, 

 loaded with plants, and resplendent with these living and 

 moving fires, as if the stars of the firmament had sunk 

 down on the savannah. On quitting the cavern we stopped 

 several times to admire the beauty of this singular scene. 

 The odoriferous vanilla and festoons of bignonia decorated 

 the entrance ; and above, on the summit of the hill, the 

 arrowy branches of the palm-trees waved murmuring in 

 the air. We descended towards the river, to take tho 

 road to the mission, where we arrived late in the night. 

 Our imagination was struck by all we had just seen. 

 Occupied continually by the present, in a country where 

 the traveller is tempted to regard human society as a new 

 institution, he is more powerfully interested by remem- 

 brances of times past. These remembrances were not 

 indeed of a distant date; but in all that is monumental 

 antiquity is a relative idea, and we easily confound what 

 is ancient with what is obscure and problematic. The 

 Egyptians considered the historical remembrances of the 

 Greeks as very recent. If the Chinese, or, as they prefer 

 calling themselves, the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, 

 could have communicated with the priests of Heliopolis, 

 they would have smiled at those pretensions of the Egyp- 

 tians to antiquity. Contrasts not less striking are found 

 in the north of Europe and of Asia, in the New "World, 

 and in every region where the human race has not pre- 

 served a long consciousness of itself. The migration of 

 the Toltecs, the most ancient historical event on the table- 

 land of Mexico, dates only in the sixth century of our 

 era. The introduction of a good system of intercalation, 

 and the reform of the calendars, the indispensable basis of 

 an accurate chronology, took place in the year 1091. These 

 epochs, which to us appear so modern, fall on fabulous 

 times, when we reflect on the history of our species between 

 the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon. We there see 

 symbolic figures sculptured on the rocks, but nc tradition 



