2 Troano MS., whose author has devoted several pages1 of his interesting work to a minute description of the various phenomena attending the disaster. (Plate LIV.) Thus he recounts. the closing scenes of the tragedy: "The year six Kan, on the eleventh Muluc, in the month Zac, there occurred terrible earthquakes, which continued without intermission until the thirteenth Chuen. The country of the hills of mud, the 'Land of Mu,' was sacrificed. Being twice upheaved, it suddenly disappeared during the night, the basin being continually shaken by volcanic forces. Being confined, these caused the land to sink and rise several times and in various places. At last the surface gave way, and the ten countries were torn asunder and scattered in fragments; unable to withstand the force of the seismic convulsions, they sank with their sixty-four millions of inhabitants, eight thousand and sixty years before the writing of this book." Does not this recital recall the story of the destruction of Atlantis told by Plato, and the division of the country by Poseidon into ten portions, assigning one to each of his ten sons? Let us hope that no one will be so bold as to accuse Plato of having been in collusion with the author of the Troano MS. The third narrative of the destruction of the "Land of Mu" is by the author of that Maya book known to us as Codex Cortesianus. His style is more prolix, less terse, more symbolical than that of the writer of the Troano. His relation of the event reads as follows (Plates LV.-LVI.): Have we not here the origin of that singular superstition that attributes ill luck to the number thirteen? And is not this superstition a reminiscence of the cataclysm, that has come down to us through the lapse of centuries? |