Here Nan took a picture, the first of many she was to take, of the girls as they stood in a market where they had just bought some gayly woven baskets. The sight of the Indians brought more stories to Walker’s mind and so, in the few miles that lay between them and their stopping place for the night, he told more tales.
He told stories of buried treasure left by the Aztecs in deep underground chambers, of turquoise and jade that was more lovely than any the modern world has discovered. He told of gold so plentiful that it had no value, of great temples that American Museums were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild.
He knew all the stories, because, since his early childhood, spent in California where Mexican labor was plentiful because it was cheap, he had been interested in the country.
When, on the third day of their journey, they approached Mexico City, Walker Jamieson was in a particularly expansive mood, one designed to keep their minds off the question of what word they would find from Rhoda in the capital.
“Below you, ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a great sweep of his arm, “you see Mexico City, the capital of this surprising republic of Mexico. There you will find romance, adventure, everything.”
CHAPTER XI
A LEGEND
“Mexico City,” he went on, as though he were a guide introducing a party of tourists to its first sight of a city, “lies, as you can see from here, in a mountain valley on the Great Central Plateau. Constructed on a former lake by those Aztecs who once made of this whole region a grand and glorious place, it was called by them ‘Tenochtitlan’, an Aztec word meaning ‘Belonging to the property of the Temple.’
“When the Spaniards conquered Tenochtitlan, they found grand palaces and elegant homes under the shadow of the mountains that lie all about. They found gardens more beautiful and more highly cultivated than any they had ever known. They found wealth and splendour such as not even their vivid imaginations had ever constructed. They found everything,” he finished dramatically, “and they drove the people who had conceived it out, and they took it unto themselves, and it went to ruin. You see now, the modern city, and as you go through its streets, you will find everywhere evidences of all these changes living side by side with the new that the present generation is in the process of building up.”