156 



THE PYRAMIDS. 



emigration and removal from place to place ; and also 

 that the dim record of the great events I have alluded to 

 should be intertwined with others, referring to events of 

 a far more recent date ; that the personages and char* 

 acters of the earliest time should be strangely mingled 

 with the history of such as may have existed ages after ; 

 and, that the seat which a people actually occupied, 

 should be in their records, the very theatre upon which 

 the great events pictured by their traditions should have 

 taken place. 



The origin of the huge pyramidal monuments of Asia, 

 in the traditional record remaining among the nations of 

 antiquity, of the building of the tower of Babel, which 

 was itself but a symbolic representation of the mountain 

 on which the ark rested after the deluge, has been fully 

 established by the pens of many able writers, and the 

 resemblance between the latter, as described by the 

 ancients, and the teocallis or temples of the ancient peo- 

 ple of Anahuac, is too glaring to be overlooked or denied, 

 by the most skeptically disposed. 



There can be no reasonable doubt as to the strict 

 analogy; and if there were, the traditions attached to 

 the great pyramid of Cholula, among the rest, would 

 remove it. 



It is too interesting not to merit transcription. 



" Before the great inundation," runs the tradition, 

 " which took place four thousand eight hundred years 

 after the creation of the world, the country of Anahuac 

 was inhabited by giants ; all of whom either perished in 

 the inundation, or were transformed into fishes, save 

 seven, who fled into caverns. When the waters sub- 

 sided, one of the giants, called Xelhua, surnamed the 

 Architect, went to Cholula, where, as a memorial of the 

 mountain Tlaloc, which had served for an asylum to 

 himself and his six brethren, he built an artificial hill in 

 form of a pyramid. He ordered bricks to be made in 

 the province of Tlanamalco, at the foot of the Sierra of 

 Cocoll : and to convey them to Cholula, he placed a file 

 of men who passed them from hand to hand. The gods 

 beheld with wrath this edifice, the top of which was to 



