When I look through my notes about Tezcuco, I do not find much more to mention, except that a favourite dish here consists of flies’ eggs fried. These eggs are deposited at the edge of the lake, and the Indians fish them out and sell them in the market-place. So large is the quantity of these eggs, that at a spot where a little stream deposits carbonate of lime, a peculiar kind of travertine is forming which consists of masses of them imbedded in tho calcareous deposit.
The flies[[15]] which produce these eggs are called by the Mexicans “axayacatl” or “water-face.” There was a celebrated Aztec king who was called Axayacatl; and his name is indicated in the picture-writings by a drawing of a man’s face covered with water. The eggs themselves are sold in cakes in the market, pounded and cooked, and also in lumps au naturel, forming a substance like the roe of a fish. This is known by the characteristic name of “ahuauhtli”, that is “water-wheat.”[[16]]
[15] Corixa femorala, and Notonecta uniforciata, according to MM. Meneville and Virlet d’Aoust, in a Paper on the subject of the granular or oolitic travertine of Tezcuco in the Bulletin (1859) of the Geological Society of France.
[16] Huauhtli is an indigenous grain abounding in Michoacán, for which “wheat” is the best equivalent I can give. European wheat was, of course, unknown in the country until after the Conquest.
The last thing we did at Tezcuco, was to witness the laying down of a new line of water-pipes for the saltworks. This I mention because of the pipes, which were exactly those introduced into Spain by the Moors and brought here by the Spaniards. These pipes are of glazed earthenware, taper at one end, and each fitting into the large end of the next. The cement is a mixture of lime, fat, and hair, which gets hard and firm when cold, but can be loosened by a very slight application of heat. A thousand years has made no alteration in the way of making these pipes. Here, however, the ground is so level that one great characteristic of Moorish waterworks is not to be seen. I mean the water-columns which are such a feature in the country round Palermo, and in other places where the system of irrigation introduced by the Moorish invaders is still kept up. These are square pillars twenty or thirty feet high, with a cistern at the top of each, into which the water from the higher level flowed, and from which other pipes carried it on; the sole object of the whole apparatus being to break the column of water, and reduce the pressure to the thirty or forty feet which the pipes of earthenware would bear.
This subject of irrigation is very interesting with reference to the future of Mexico. We visited two or three country-houses in the plateaux, where the gardens are regularly watered by artificial channels, and the result is a vegetation of wonderful exuberance and beauty, converting these spots into oases in the desert. On the lower levels of the tierra templada where the sugar-cane is cultivated, a costly system of water-supply has been established in the haciendas with the best results. Even in the plains of Mexico and Puebla, the grain-fields are irrigated to some small degree. But notwithstanding this progress in the right direction, the face of the country shows the most miserable waste of one of the chief elements of the wealth and prosperity of the country, the water.
In this respect, Spain and the high lands of Mexico may be compared together. There is no scarcity of rain in either country, and yet both are dry and parched, while the number and size of their torrent-beds show with what violence the mountain-streams descend into lakes or rivers, rather agents of destruction than of benefit to the land. Strangely enough, both countries have been in possession of races who understood that water was the very life-blood of the land, and worked hard to build systems of arteries to distribute it over the surface. In both countries, the warlike Spaniards overcame these races, and irrigating works already constructed were allowed to fall to ruin.
When the Moriscos were expelled from their native provinces of Andalusia and Granada, their places were but slowly filled up with other settlers, so that a great part of their aqueducts and watercourses fell into decay within a few years. These new colonists, moreover, came from the Northern provinces, where the Moorish system of culture was little understood; and, incredible as it may seem, though they must have had ocular evidence of the advantages of artificial irrigation, they even neglected to keep in repair the water-channels on their own ground. Now the traveller, riding through Southern Spain, may see in desolate barren valleys remains of the Moorish works which centuries ago brought fertility to grain-fields and orchards, and made the country the garden of Europe.
There was another nation who seem to have far surpassed both Moors and Aztecs in the magnitude of their engineering-works for this purpose. The Peruvians cut through mountains, filled up valleys, and carried whole rivers away in artificial channels to irrigate their thirsty soil. The historians’ accounts of these water-works as they were, and even travellers’ descriptions of the ruins that still remain, fill us with astonishment. It seems almost like some strange fatality that this nation too should have been conquered by the same race, the ruin of its great national works following immediately upon the Conquest.
Spain is rising again after long centuries of degradation, and is developing energies and resources which seem likely to raise it high among European nations, and the Spaniards are beginning to hold their own again among the peoples of Europe. But they have had to pay dearly for the errors of their ancestors in the great days of Charles the Fifth.