We cannot doubt that the colonists carried with them the old traditions of the mother country, and the history of the founders of their nationality; since we find them in the countries where they seem to have established large settlements soon after leaving the land of their birth. In course of time these traditions have become disfigured, wrapped, as it were, in myths, creations of fanciful and untutored imaginations, as in Hindostan: or devises of crafty priests, striving to hide the truth from the ignorant mass of the people, fostering their superstitions, in order to preserve unbounded and undisputed sway over them, as in Egypt.
In Hindostan, for example, we find the Maya custom of carrying the children astride on the hips of the nurses. That of recording the vow of the devotees, or of imploring the blessings of deity by the imprint of the hand, dipped in red liquid, stamped on the walls of the shrines and palaces. The worship of the mastodon, still extant in India, Siam, Burmah, as in the worship of _Ganeza_, the god of knowledge, with an elephant head, degenerated in that of the elephant itself.
Still extant we find likewise the innate propensity of the Mayas to exclude all foreigners from their country; even to put to death those who enter their territories (as do, even to-day, those of Santa Cruz and the inhabitants of the Tierra de Guerra) as the emissaries of Rama were informed by the friend of the owner of the country, the widow of the _great architect_, MAYA, whose name HEMA means in the Maya language “she who places ropes across the roads to impede the passage.” Even the history of the death of her husband MAYA, killed with a thunderbolt, by the god _Pourandara_, whose jealousy was aroused by his love for her and their marriage, recalls that of _Chaacmol_, the husband of _Moó_, killed by their brother Aac, by being stabbed by him three times in the back with a spear, through jealousy--for he also loved _Moó_.
Some Maya tribes, after a time, probably left their home at the South of Hindostan and emigrated to Afghanistan, where their descendants still live and have villages on the North banks of the river _Kabul_. They left behind old traditions, that they may have considered as mere fantasies of their poets, and other customs of their forefathers. Yet we know so little about the ancient Afghans, or the Maya tribes living among them, that it is impossible at present to say how much, if any, they have preserved of the traditions of their race. All we know for a certainty is that many of the names of their villages and tribes are pure American-Maya words: that their types are very similar to the features of the bearded men carved on the pillars of the castle, and on the walls of other edifices at Chichen-Itza: while their warlike habits recall those of the Mayas, who fought so bravely and tenaciously the Spanish invaders.