nd has, but not as yet satisfactorily, been identified with the
planet Venus. Without pausing to study this sign as it appears in ancient
Mexico I point out that the position and mode of representation of the
upper figure in the bas-relief sufficiently show that it is an image of a
celestial being or vision in the act of receiving the supplication of a
youth who is wearing divine insignia. There being a possibility that some
of these accessories may be somewhat indistinct in the original bas-relief
now preserved at the Royal Ethnographical Museum at Berlin, I do not
venture to draw special attention to the possibility of further points of
resemblance between the Peruvian tradition and this Guatemalan sculpture.

At the same time I shall not omit allusion to the wavy figure winding
upwards from the waist of the supplicant, which recurs in four out of the
seven slabs. It may yet prove to answer to the description of "a sort of
serpent," which is recorded as twining over the shoulders of the vision
who was "dressed like the Inca." The lion's head which appears in the
drawing to cover the left hand of the supplicant and the fact that his
left foot only, in some cases, wears a sandal, are important and
interesting features to which I shall revert further on.

Without attempting to offer any explanation of the truly remarkable fact
that a bas-relief exhumed in Guatemala should so strikingly agree with a
description preserved in a Peruvian tradition, I shall merely point out a
second similar though much less remarkable case of agreement.

Padre Oliva records two instances in which a "royal eagle" figures in
connection with members of the Inca dynasty. One of these relates to the
ancestors of Manco Capac, the reputed founder of Cuzco. His
great-grandmother, being abandoned by her husband, attempted to sacrifice
her young son to Pachacamac. A royal eagle descended, carried him away in
his talons and set him down in an island off the Pacific coast, named
Guayan, "because it was covered with willows." Oliva explains this
tradition as a fanciful way of recording the fact that the youth's life
was probably endangered, and that he had fled and taken refuge on an
island. At the age of twenty-one he made his way back to the continent on
a raft, but was seized by hostile people. His life was, however, saved by
the daughter of a chieftain who returned with him to the island. Her name
is given as Ciguar, a word strangely like the Nahuatl