ptional opportunities for obtaining information, adds to the above
the following translation of a Nahuatl inscription which had been written
by the native scribe below the drawing which unfortunately is now lost.
"Nobles and Lords: Here you have your documents, the mirror of your past,
the history of your ancestors who, out of fear for a deluge, constructed
this place of refuge or asylum for the possibility of the recurrence of
such a calamity."

After citing the opinions of various authors concerning the origin of the
pyramid, Orozco y Berra concludes that "there is no certainty about its
age, but instinctively it is supposed to be extremely ancient and to
pertain to pre-historic times. According to my judgment the people who
constructed it belonged to the same civilization as the builders of
Teotihuacan and possibly were their contemporaries. Cholollan was also a
venerated sanctuary, in which the religious idea predominated" (_op. cit._
p. 363). "At the time of the Conquest a temple stood on the summit of the
pyramid and contained an image of Quetzalcoatl (the Divine Twain, the
Creator, the Father and Mother of all) as well as an aerolite, shaped like
a frog which had fallen from heaven, wrapped in a ball of flame." In the
Vatican MS. of Padre Rios there is another version of the tradition that
the pyramid had been erected by giants after a deluge, which had destroyed
everything, ... and that before it was finished, fire fell upon it causing
the death of its builders and the abandonment of the work.

Allusion has already been made, in the preceding pages, to the native
traditions according to which, "there had been three memorable epochs in
the history of mankind, which lasted for centuries and were abruptly
terminated, each time by a mighty convulsion of nature. The majority of
human beings perished in each of these, but a remnant survived and thus
the race was preserved."

The periodical festival of thanksgiving, which was still observed at the
time of the Conquest by the native races, abundantly testifies to the
reality of their belief in these great catastrophes and the preservation
of their ancestors from utter extermination. It was doubtless in order to
make their past history conform with the quadruple organization of all
epochs of their native Calendar that the native sages assigned their
successive destructions to the separate agencies of fire, water and air,
in the form of violent tempests and cyclones. Fro