Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

\ THE SCENE OF MAN’S SURVIVAL. 373

upon the fruits of the garden, and knew neither sorrow nor suffering, neither toil nor hunger.

But one day the evil-one came, as in the Bible legend ; the Prince of the Rakchasos (Raknaros—Ragnarok ?) came, and broke up this paradise. Adima and Héva leaye their island ; they pass to a boundless country ; they fall upon an evil time ; “trees, flowers, fruits, birds, yanish in an instant, amid terrific clamor” ;* the Drift has come ; they are ina world of trouble, sorrow, poverty, and toil.

And when we turn to America we find the legends looking, not westward, but eastward, to this same islandrefuge of the race.

When the Navajos come out of the cave the white race goes east, and the red-men go west; so that the Nayajos inhabit a country west of their original habitat, just as the Jews inhabit one east of it.

“Let me conclude,” says the legend, “ by telling how the Nayajos came by the seed they now cultivate. All the wise men being one day assembled, a Turkey-Hen came flying from the direction of the morning star, and shook from her feathers an ear of blue corn into the midst of the company ; and in subsequent visits brought all the other seeds they possess.” +

In the Peruvian legends the civilizers of the race came from the east, after the cave-life.

So that these people not only came from the east, but they maintained intercourse for some time afterward with the parent-land.

On page 174, ante, we learn that the Iroquois believed that when Joskeha renewed the world, after the great battle with Darkness, he learned from the great tortoise

* Jacolliet, ‘The Bible in India,” p. 198. + Bancroft’s “ Native Races,” vol. iii, p. 83.