Anahuac : or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern

by Edward B. Tylor

Prickly pears, aloes, and mesquite bushes have overgrown the pyramids in all directions, as though they had been mere natural hills. In Sicily one may see the lava fields of Etna planted with prickly pears: in the ordinary course of things, it requires several centuries before even the surface of this hard lava will disintegrate into soil; but the roots of the cactus soon crack it, and a few years suffice to break it up to a sufficient depth to allow of vineyards being planted upon it. Here the same plant has in the same way affected the porous amygdaloid with which the pyramids are faced, and has cut up the surface sadly; but the vegetation which covers them will at any rate defend them from the rains, and now centuries will make but little change in the appearance of these remarkable buildings.

Near Nice there is a hill which gives a wonderfully correct idea of the appearance of the terraced teocallis of Mexico, as they must have looked before time effaced the sharpness of their lines. Where the valley of the Paglione and that of St. Andre meet, the hill between them terminates in a half pyramid, the angle of which lies toward the south; and the inhabitants—as their custom is in southern Europe, have turned the two slopes to account, by building them up into terraces, to prevent the soil they have laboriously carried up from being swept down by the first heavy rain. Seen from the proper point of view the resemblance is complete.

From the south side of the Temple of the Moon runs an avenue of burial-mounds, the Micaotli, “the path of the dead.” On these mounds, and round the foot of the pyramids themselves, the whole population of the once great city of Teotihuacán and its neighbourhood used to congregate, to see the priests and the victims march round the terraces and up the stairs in full view of them all. Standing here, one could imagine the scene that Cortes and his men saw from their camp, outside Mexico, on that dreadful day when the Mexicans had cut off their retreat along the causeways, and taken more than sixty Spanish prisoners. Bernal Diaz was there, and tells the tale how they heard from the city the great drum of Huitzilopochtli sending forth a strange and awful sound, that could be heard for miles, and with it many horns and trumpets; and how, when they had looked towards the great teocalli, they saw the Mexicans dragging up the prisoners, pushing and beating them as they went, till they had got them up to the open space at the top, “where the cursed idols stood.” Then they put plumes of feathers on their heads, and fans in their hands, and made them dance before the idol; and when they had danced, they threw them on their backs on the sacrificial stone that stood there, and, sawing open their breasts with knives of stone, they tore out their hearts, and offered them up in sacrifice; and the bodies they flung down the stairs to the bottom. More than this the Spaniards cannot have seen, though Diaz describes the rest of the proceedings as though they had been done in his sight; but it was not the first time they had witnessed such things, and they knew well enough what was happening down below,—how the butchers were waiting to cut up the carcases as they came down, that they might be cooked with chile, and eaten in the solemn banquet of the evening.

The day was closing in by this time; and our man was waiting with the horses at the foot of the great pyramid; and with him an Indian, whom we had caught half an hour before, and sent off with a real to buy pulque, and to collect such obsidian arrows and clay heads as were to be found at the ranchos in the neighbourhood.

Near the place we started from, two or three Indians were diligently at work at their stone-quarry, that is to say, they were laboriously bringing out great hewn stones from the side of the pyramid, to build their walls with; and indeed we could see in every house for miles round stones that had come from the same source, as was proved by the stucco still remaining upon them, smoothed like polished marble, and painted dull red with cinnabar.

As I write this, it brings to my recollection an old Roman trophy in North Italy, built—like these pyramids—of a shell of hewn stone, filled with rough stones and cement, now as hard as the rock itself. There I saw the inhabitants of the town which stands at its foot, carrying off the great limestone blocks, but first cutting them up into pieces of a size that they could move about, and build into their houses. Here and there, in this little Italian town, there were to be seen in the walls letters of the old inscription which were once upon the trophy; and the age of the houses shewed that the monument had served as a quarry for centuries.

As we rode home, we noticed by the sides of the road, and where ditches had been cut, numbers of old Mexican stone-floors covered with stucco. The earth has accumulated above them to the depth of two or three feet, so that their position is like that of the Roman pavements so often found in Europe; and we may guess, from what we saw exposed, how great must be the number of such remains still hidden, and how vast a population must once have inhabited this plain, now almost deserted.

Two days afterwards we came back. In the ploughed fields in the neighbourhood we made repeated trials whether it was possible to stand still in any spot where there was no relic of old Mexico within our reach; but this we could not do. Everywhere the ground was full of unglazed pottery and obsidian; and we even found arrows and clay figures that were good enough for a museum. When we left England, we both doubted the accounts of the historians of the Conquest, believing that they had exaggerated the numbers of the population, and the size of the cities, from a natural desire to make the most of their victories, and to write as wonderful a history as they could, as historians are prone to do. But our examination of Mexican remains soon induced us to withdraw this accusation, and even made us inclined to blame the chroniclers for having had no eyes for the wonderful things that surrounded them.

I do not mean by this that we felt inclined to swallow the monstrous exaggerations of Solis and Gomara and other Spanish chroniclers, who seemed to think that it was as easy to say a thousand as a hundred, and that it sounded much better. But when this class of writers are set aside, and the more valuable authorities severely criticised, it does not seem to us that the history thus extracted from these sources is much less reliable than European history of the same period. There is, perhaps, no better way of expressing this opinion than to say that what we saw of Mexico tended generally to confirm Prescott’s History of the Conquest, and but seldom to make his statements appear to us improbable.

There are other mounds near the pyramids, besides the Micaotli. Two sides of the Pyramid of the Sun are surrounded by them; and there are two squares of mounds at equal distances, north and south of it, besides innumerable scattered hillocks. There are some sculptured blocks of stone lying near the pyramids, and inside the smaller one is buried what appears to be a female bust of colossal size, with the mouth like an oval ring, so common in Mexican sculptures.