“He is not dead,” said Sandoval, after examination.
“Take him hence, also,” Olmedo ordered. “At leisure to-morrow we can learn what importance he hath.”
Hardly were the captives out when the chamber became a scene of wild iconoclasm. The smoking censers were overthrown; the sculpturings on the walls were defaced; the altar was rifled of the rich accumulation of gifts; fagots snatched from the undying fires in front of the sanctuaries were applied to the carved and gilded wood-work; and amid the smoke, and with shouting and laughter and the noisy abandon of school-boys at play, the zealots despoiled the gigantic image of its ornaments and treasure,—of the bow and golden arrows in its hands; the feathers of humming birds on its left foot; the necklace of gold and silver hearts; the serpent enfolding its waist in coils glistening with pearls and precious stones. A hundred hands then pushed the monster from its sitting-place, and rolled it out of the door, and finally off the azoteas. Tezca’ shared the same fate. The greedy flames mounted to the towers, and soon not a trace of the ages of horrible worship remained, except the smoking walls of the ruined sanctuaries.
Down from the heights marched the victors; into the palace they marched; and not a hand was raised against them on the way; the streets were almost deserted.
“Bien!” said Cortes, as he dismounted once more in front of his quarters. “Muy bien! We have their king and chief-priests; we have burned their churches, disgraced their gods, and slain their nobles by the thousand. The war is over, gentlemen; let us to our couches. Welcome rest! welcome peace!”
And the weary army, accepting his words as verity, went to rest, though the sun flamed in the brassy sky; but rest there was not; ere dreams could follow slumber, the trumpets sounded, and the battle was on again, fiercer than ever.
The sun set, and the night came; then the companies thought to rest; but Cortes, made tireless by rage, went out after them, and burned a vast district of houses.
And the flames so filled the sky with brilliance that the sun seemed to have stood still just below the horizon.
During the lurid twilight, Olmedo laid away, in shallow graves dug for them in the palace-garden, more than fifty Christians, of whom six and forty perished on the temple and its terraces.