mplex ritual,
a well stocked pantheon, a certain understanding of astronomy and
psychic phenomena, he may withal be called barbarian, even as was
Abraham on Moriah barbaric when the altar of his god called for
sacrifice of his only son. But a people of such culture could not with
truth be called savage.

The tale told here has to do with these same historic barbarians. That
there is more of depth to the background of American Indian life than
is usually suggested by historians has been made clear of two tribes
by Dr. Le Plongeon in his _Sacred Mysteries of the Mayas and Quiches
11500 Years Ago_. Similar mysteries and secret orders exist to-day in
the tribes of the Mexicos and Arizona. In certain instances the names
and meanings of offices identical with those of Yucatan survive, to
prove an ancient intercourse between the Mayan tribes and those who
now dwell in the valley of the Rio Grande. The Abbe Clavigero left
account of a thousand years of the history of one tribe as transcribed
by him from their own hieroglyphic records. Lord Kingsborough may have
been far astray with his theory that the people of America were the
Lost Tribes of Israel, but the researches embodied in his remarkable
_Antiquities of Mexico_, demonstrated the fact that they were not a
people of yesterday.

As to historic notes used in this tale of the more northern Sun
worshipers: Cabeza de Vaca, the first European to cross the land from
the Mississippi to Mexico (1528-1536), left record in Spanish archives
of Don Teo the Greek. Castenada, historian for the Coronado expedition
(1540-1542), left reluctant testimony of the worse than weird night in
one Indian town of the Rio Grande, when impress was left on the native
mind that the strong god of the white conquerors demanded much of
human sacrifice. In that journal is record also of the devoted Fray
Luis, of whose end only the Indians know. In _Soldiers of the Cross_
by Archbishop Salpointe, there is an account of a god-offering made in
1680 (after almost a century of European influences), warranting the
chapter describing a similar sacrifice on the same shrine when the
pagan mind was yet supreme and the call of the primitive gods a vital
thing.

It is yet so vital that neither imported government nor imported
creeds have quite stamped it out. Only the death of the elders and the
breaking up of the clans can eradicate it. When that is done, the
Latin and the Anglo-Saxon will have swept from the hea