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The huge boulders from the glacial epoch which are scattered over their country are the pebbles he tossed in play or in anger. The cleft in the Andes, through which flows the river Funha, was opened by a single blow of Nemqueteba, chief god of the Muyscas.
These were the Chibchas, Muyscas, or Mozcas, divided into two kingdoms, with capitals at Bogota and Tunja, but united apparently in spiritual allegiance to the high pontiff of Sogamozo or Iraca. By a long and ascetic novitiate, this ghostly ruler was reputed to have acquired such sanctity that the waters and the rain obeyed him, and the weather depended on his will.
As the Tartarian and Mexican zodiacs contain the signs of the Monkey and the Tiger, they, no doubt, originated in the torrid zone. With the Muyscas, inhabitants of New Grenada, the first sign, as in eastern Asia, was that of water, figured by a Frog.
Moreover, there were civilized communities in that part of the continent which the Incas had not subjugated, such as the Muyscas on the table-land of Bogota, north of Quito, who had a remarkable civil and religious organization, a temple of the sun built with stone columns, a regular system of computing time, a peculiar calendar, and who used small circular gold plates as coin.
I saw no person who had any natural deformity; and I may say the same of thousands of Caribs, Muyscas, and Mexican and Peruvian Indians, whom we observed during the course of five years.
The Incas of Peru had pushed their conquests and their religious wars as far as the banks of the Napo and the Amazon, where their language extended over a small space of land; but the civilization of the Peruvians, of the inhabitants of Quito, and of the Muyscas of New Grenada, never appears to have had any sensible influence on the moral state of the nations of Guiana.
Sometimes, also, religious ceremonies are preserved which took rise in another zone; and the Muyscas, according to ancient traditions, made Bochica, their first legislator and the founder of their worship, arrive from the plains situate to the east of the Cordilleras.
It may seem strange that a nation, which had proceeded thus far in its observations, should have gone no farther; and that, notwithstanding its general advance in civilization, it should in this science have fallen so far short, not only of the Mexicans, but of the Muyscas, inhabiting the same elevated regions of the great southern plateau with themselves.
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