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On the other side of the Atlantic, the Aztecs used obsidian blades for the sacrifices, in which hundreds of human victims perished miserably; and similar blades are used by the Guanches of Teneriffe to open the bodies of their chiefs after death.
Berber is of course their common origin, and they are identical with the Kabyles of Algeria, the Touariks of the Sahara, and the Guanches of the Canary Isles. Yet in one great point, like the Arabs, the Riffi, in common with the Berber race, lacks the power of cohesion and the spirit of patriotism, which should have welded all Berbers into one powerful people.
Thus we can correct M. Berthelot, who follows others in asserting that only the Guanches of Tenerife mummified their dead. The oldest description of this embalming is by a 'judicious and ingenious man who had lived twenty years in the island as a physitian and merchant. It was inserted by Dr. Eden, an Englishman who visited Tenerife in 1662.
Historians exaggerated the muscular strength of the Guanches, as, previous to the voyage of Bougainville and Cordoba, colossal proportions were attributed to the tribe that inhabited the southern extremity of America. I never saw Guanche mummies but in the cabinets of Europe.
Those learned enquirers who trace Egyptians wherever there are mummies, hieroglyphics, or pyramids, will imagine perhaps that the race of Typhon was united to the Guanches by the Berbers, real Atlantes, to whom belong the Tibboes and the Tuarycks of the desert: but this hypothesis is supported by no analogy between the Berberic and Coptic languages, which are justly considered as remnants of the ancient Egyptian.
On opening those of the Guanches, remains of aromatic plants are discovered, among which the Chenopodium ambrosioides is constantly perceived: the bodies are often decorated with small laces, to which are hung little discs of baked earth, which appear to have served as numerical signs, and resemble the quippoes of the Peruvians, the Mexicans, and the Chinese.
On the arrival of the Spaniards, its inhabitants were distinguished from the other Canarians by marks of greater civilization. Their houses were built with freestone, while the Guanches of Teneriffe dwelt in caverns. At Lancerota, a very singular custom prevailed at that time, of which we find no example except among the people of Thibet.
It is contained in the narrative of the voyage of Aloysio Cadamusto, who landed at the Canaries in 1505. This traveller was witness of no eruptions, but he positively affirms that, like Etna, this mountain burns without interruption, and that the fire has been seen by christians held in slavery by the Guanches of Teneriffe.
It is a parallelogram with four bastions in star-shape, fronting the sea, and an embrasured wall facing the town. It began as a chapel, set up by De Lugo to N. S. de la Consolacion, and a tower was added in 1493. It was destroyed by the Guanches and rebuilt by Charles Quint: the present building assumed its shape in 1579.
For impudence does not only supply all defects, but gives them a greater grace than if they had needed no art, as all other ornaments are commonly nothing else but the remedies or disguises of imperfections; and therefore he thinks him very weak that is unprovided of this excellent and most useful quality, without which the best natural or acquired parts are of no more use than the Guanches' darts, which, the virtuosos say, are headed with butter hardened in the sun.
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