Nor is this the whole story.
In order to strengthen his argument, he gives a new and corrected
version of this tradition. "It told," he writes, "that _pale faces_ had
once before occupied the _hot country_, coming from beyond the _great
water_. _Perhaps_ with this were coupled also tales of suffering and
wrongs; _perhaps_ how cruelly they, the natives, had been forced, by
these hard task-masters, to labor upon the truncated pyramids and their
crowning chapels. With unrequited Indian toil, these men had builded
cities and public works which still preserved their memory, though they
themselves had long since perished, having fulfilled their allotted
centuries. But with their decaying monuments they left a fearful
prophecy, and thus it ran: that _floating houses_ would again return to
the eastern coast, wafted by like winds, and filled with the same race,
to teach the same religion, and to practise the same cruelties, until
they again finished their cycle, and gave place to others, such as the
laws of climate and population might determine." When the reader, after
perusing this extraordinary relation, recovers his breath, he naturally
casts his eye towards the bottom of the page, in the hope of finding
some explanation of it.
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