Oviedo relates that in the province of Guataro, in Guatemala, an actual rivalry prevailed among the people to be slain at the death of their cacique, for they had been taught that only such as went with him would ever find their way to the paradise of the departed.[240-1] Theirs was therefore somewhat of a selfish motive, and only in certain parts of Peru, where polygamy prevailed, and the rule was that only one wife was to be sacrificed, does the deportment of husbands seem to have been so creditable that their widows actually disputed one with another for the pleasure of being buried alive with the dead body, and bearing their spouse company to the other world.[240-2] Wives who have found few parallels since the famous matron of Ephesus!
The fire built nightly on the grave was to light the spirit on his journey. By a coincidence to be explained by the universal sacredness of the number, both Algonkins and Mexicans maintained it for _four_ nights consecutively. The former related the tradition that one of their ancestors returned from the spirit land and informed their nation that the journey thither consumed just _four_ days, and that collecting fuel every night added much to the toil and fatigue the soul encountered, all of which could be spared it by the relatives kindling nightly a fire on the grave. Or as Longfellow has told it:--
"Four days is the spirit's journey To the land of ghosts and shadows, Four its lonely night encampments. Therefore when the dead are buried, Let a fire as night approaches Four times on the grave be kindled, That the soul upon its journey May not grope about in darkness."
The same length of time, say the Navajos, does the departed soul wander over a gloomy marsh ere it can discover the ladder leading to the world below, where are the homes of the setting and the rising sun, a land of luxuriant plenty, stocked with game and covered with corn. To that land, say they, sink all lost seeds and germs which fall on the earth and do not sprout. There below they take root, bud, and ripen their fruit.[241-1]
After four days, once more, in the superstitions of the Greenland Eskimos, does the soul, for that term after death confined in the body, at last break from its prison-house and either rise in the sky to dance in the aurora borealis or descend into the pleasant land beneath the earth, according to the manner of death.[241-2]