There--not,
indeed, exquisite joys--but a life of unruffled placidity, void of
labor, vacant of strong emotions, a sort of material Nirvana, awaited
them.[244-3] For these reasons, they, with most other American nations,
interred the corpse lying east and west, and not as the traveller Meyen
has suggested,[244-4] from the reminiscences of some ancient migration.
Beyond the Cordilleras, quite to the coast of Brazil, the innumerable
hordes who wandered through the sombre tropical forests of that immense
territory, also pointed to the west, to the region beyond the mountains,
as the land where the souls of their ancestors lived in undisturbed
serenity; or, in the more brilliant imaginations of the later
generations, in a state of perennial inebriety, surrounded by infinite
casks of rum, and with no white man to dole it out to them.[245-1] The
natives of the extreme south, of the Pampas and Patagonia, suppose the
stars are the souls of the departed. At night they wander about the sky,
but the moment the sun rises they hasten to the cheerful light, and are
seen no more until it disappears in the west.
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