we paid you. But now that you are no longer men, you shall feel our strength. We shall grind and tear your flesh to pieces," said their grinding stones.
And then their dogs spoke and said: "Why did you give us nothing to eat? You scarcely looked at us, but you chased us and threw us out. You always had a stick[49] ready to strike us while you were eating.
"Thus it was that you treated us. You did not speak to us. Perhaps we shall not kill you now; but why did you not look ahead, why did you not think about yourselves? Now we shall destroy you, now you shall feel the teeth of our mouths; we shall devour you," said the dogs, and then, they destroyed their faces.[50]
And at the same time, their griddles and pots spoke: "Pain and suffering you have caused us. Our mouths and our faces were blackened with soot; we were always put on the fire and you burned us as though we felt no pain. Now you shall feel it, we shall burn you," said their pots, and they all destroyed their [the wooden men's] faces. The stones of the hearth,[51] which were heaped together, hurled themselves straight from the fire against their heads causing them pain.[52]
The desperate ones [the men of wood] ran as quickly as they could; they wanted to climb to the tops of the houses and the houses fell down and threw them to the ground; they wanted to climb to the treetops, and the trees cast them far away; they wanted to enter the caverns, and the caverns repelled them.[53]
So was the ruin of the men who had been created and formed, the men made to be destroyed and annihilated; the mouths and faces of all of them were mangled.
And it is said that their descendants are the monkeys which now live in the forests;[54] these are all that remain of them because their flesh was made only of wood by the Creator and the Maker.
And therefore the monkey looks like man, and is an example of a generation of men which were created and made but were only wooden figures.
[49] Yacal u bi, "leaning against the wall," or "lying on the ground," according to the Diccionario Cakchiquel.
[50] To understand this paragraph better, it is necessary to re-establish the original punctuation which Brasseur de Bourbourg has altered in his transcription, so that it will read as follows: Xere c'oh yv-u chaah vi; mavi c'oh chauic. Ma ta cu mi-x-oh camic chyve. Hupacha mavi mi-x-yx nauic, x-yx nau ta cutchyvih? Ta cut x-oh zach vi, vacamic cut x-ch'y A ca bac qo pa ca chi; x-qu'yx ca tio, x-e cha ri tzi chique, ta x-cut qui vach.
[51] They are the three hearthstones of the Indians on which the comal, or the cooking pots, rested.
[52] The idea of a flood in olden times and the belief in another which would be the end of the world, and would have had characters similar to those described here in the Popol Vuh, still existed among the Indians of Guatemala in the years following the Spanish conquest, according to the Apologética Historia (Chap. CCXXXV, p. 620). Bishop Las Casas says in this work that "They had, among them, information of the flood and of the end of the world, and called it Butic, which is the word which means flood of many waters and means [the final] judgment, and so they believe that another Butic is about to come, which is another flood and judgment, not of water, but of fire, which they say would be the end of the world, in which all the creatures would have to quarrel, especially those which serve man, like the stones on which they grind their corn and wheat, the pots, the pitchers, giving to understand that they will turn against man."
[53] Xa chi yuch hul chi qui vach, literally, the caverns covered their faces, scorned them.
[54] According to the Anales de Cuauhtitlán, in the fourth age of the earth, "many people were drowned and others hurled into the mountains and were changed into monkeys."
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