Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel
THE BRIDGE. 377
tled into the deep, they must at first have formed long, continuous strings of islands, almost touching each other, resembling very much the Aleutian Archipelago, or the Bahama group ; and these islands continued to be used, during later ages, as the stepping-stones for migrations and intercourse between the old and the new worlds, just as the discovery of the Azores helped forward the discovery of the New World by Columbus ; he used them, we know, as a halting-place in his great voyage.
When Job speaks of “the island of the innocent,” which was spared from utter destruction, he prefaces it by asking, (chap. xxii) :
“15. Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden ?
“16. Which were (was?) cut down out of time, whose Soundation was overflown with a flood.”
And in chapter xxviii, verse 4, we have what may be another allusion to this “ way,” along which go the people who are on their journey, and which “ divideth the flood,” and on which some are escaping.
The Quiche manuscript, as translated by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg,* gives an account of the migration of the Quiche race to America from some eastern land in a very early day, in “ the day of darkness,” ere the sun was, in the so-called glacial age.
When they moved to America they wandered for a long time through forests and over mountains, and “they had a long passage to make, through the sea, along the shingle and pebbles and drifted sand.” And this long passage was through the sea “which was parted for their passage.” That is, the sea was on both sides of this long ridge of rocks and sand.
17 * Tylor’s “Early Mankind,” p. 308,