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

by Edward B. Tylor

Then the Administrador seated himself behind a great book, and the calling over the “raya” began. Every man in turn was called by name, and answered in a loud voice, “I praise God!;” then saying how much he had earned in the day, for the Administrador to write down. “Juan Fernandez!”—“Alabo a Dios, tres reales y medio:” “I praise God, one and ninepence.” “José Valdes!”—“I praise God, eighteen pence, and sixpence for the boy;” and so on, through a couple of hundred names.

Then came, not unacceptably, a little cup of pasty chocolate and a long roll for each of us. Then Don Guillermo and our host talked about their mutual acquaintances in Mexico, and we asked questions about sugar-planting, and walked about the boiling-house, where the night-gang of brown men were hard at work stirring and skimming at the boiling-pans, and ladling out coarse unrefined sugar into little earthen bowls to cool. This common sugar in bowls is very generally used by the poorer Mexicans. The sugar-boilers were naked excepting a cotton girdle. These men were very strong, and with great powers of endurance, but they did not at all resemble the strong men of Europe with their great muscles standing up under their skin, the men in Michael Angelo’s pictures, or the Farnese Hercules. They are equally unlike the thin wiry Arabs, whose strength seems so disproportionate to their lean little bodies.

The pure Mexican Indian is short and sturdy; and, until you have observed the peculiarities of the race, you would say he was too stout and flabby to be strong. But this appearance is caused by the immense thickness of his skin, which conceals the play of his muscles; and in reality his strength is very great, especially in the legs and thighs, and in the muscles that are brought into action in carrying burdens. Sartorius used to observe the Indian miners bringing loads of above five-hundred-weight up a hundred fathoms of mine-ladders, which consist of trunks of trees fixed slanting across the shaft, with notches cut in them for steps.

As I have said before, it is not the mere training of the individual that has produced this remarkable development of the power of carrying loads. The centuries before the Conquest, when there were no beasts of burden, had gradually produced a race whose bodies were admirably fitted for such work; and the persistency with which they have clung to their old habits has done much to prevent their losing this peculiarity.

To complete the description of the Indians which I have been led into by speaking of the sugar-boilers,—they are chocolate-brown in colour, with curved noses, straight black hair hanging flat round their heads and covering their wonderfully low foreheads, and occasionally a scanty black beard. Their faces are broadly oval, their eyes far apart, and they have wide mouths with coarse lips. Not bad faces on the whole, but heavy and unexpressive.

At ten o’clock came a heavy supper, the substantial meal of the day, and immediately afterwards we went to bed, and dreamt such dreams as may be imagined. We were off early in the morning with a wizened old mestizo to guide us to the ruins of Xochicalco, which are on this very estate of Temisco. The estate is forty miles across, however, and it is a long ride to the ruins. After we leave the fields of sugar-cane, we see scarcely a hut, nor a patch of cultivated ground. At last we get to Xochicalco, and find ourselves at the foot of a hill, some four hundred feet in height, extraordinarily regular in its conical shape, more so than any natural hill could be, unless it were the cone of a volcano. At different heights upon this hill, we could see from below broad terraces running round and round it. A little nearer we came upon a great ditch. The sides had fallen in, in many places; sometimes it was quite filled up, and everywhere it was overgrown with thick brushwood, as was the hill itself. It seems that this ditch runs quite round the base of the hill, and is three miles long. Climbing up through the thicket of thorny bushes and out upon the terraces, it became quite evident that the hill had been artificially shaped. The terraces were built up with blocks of solid stone, and paved with the same. On the neighbouring hills we could discern traces of more terrace-roads of the same kind; there must be many miles of them still remaining.

But it was when we reached the summit, that we found the most remarkable part of the structure. The top has been cut away so as to form a large level space, which was surrounded by a stone wall, now in ruins. Inside the inclosure are several mounds of stone, doubtless burial-places, and all that is left of the pyramid. Ruined and defaced as it is, I shall never forget our feelings of astonishment and admiration as we pushed our way through the bushes, and suddenly came upon it. We were quite unprepared for anything of the kind; all we knew of the place when we started that morning being that there were some curious old ruins there.

The pyramid was composed of blocks of hewn stone, so accurately fitted together as hardly to show the joints, and the carving goes on without interruption from one block to another. Some of these blocks are eight feet long, and nearly three feet wide. They were laid together without mortar, and indeed, from the construction of the building, none was required. The first storey is about sixteen feet high, including the plinth at the bottom. Above the plinth comes a sculptured group of figures, which is repeated in panels all round the pyramid, twice on each side. Each panel occupies a space thirty feet long by ten in height, and the bas-reliefs project three or four inches. There is a chief, dressed in a girdle, and with a head-dress of feathers just like those of the Red Indians of the north. Below the girdle he terminates in a scroll. In the middle of the group is what may perhaps be a palm-tree, with a rabbit at its foot. Close to the tree, and reaching nearly to the same height, is a figure with a crocodile’s head wearing a crown, and with drapery in parallel lines, like the wings of the creatures in the Assyrian bas-reliefs. Indeed this may very likely be a conventional representation of the robes of feather-work so characteristic of Mexico.