It was easy to build an Indian city that would present a most imposing appearance, for the climate was well fitted for drying mud thoroughly. Besides, there was an inexhaustible supply of pumice-stone (tepetate), and an exceedingly soft, gray quarry stone, for caps and lintels, with an excellent quality of cement, and material for "fresco painting" of the walls, abundant and cheap. All these articles are combined in the building of the modern city, and give it its present appearance of elegance and great durability. But in the old city, one-story palaces of dried mud, plastered and frescoed, with large interior courts like that I have described at Tezcuco, must have been among the most imposing structures. If tepetate was employed in the construction of the royal palaces, it would not have added materially to the weight resting upon the earthy foundations; for when the water in the ditches occupied half the street,[41] ] the foundations must have been so much softer than at present, that structures of the lightest material only could be borne.
In his anxiety to keep up a resemblance between his conquests and that of Granada, Cortéz calls the teocallis, or Indian mounds which he found, mosques, and speaks of "forty towers, the largest of which has fifty steps leading to its main body, and is higher than the tower of the principal church in Seville."[42] ] Bernal Diaz says there were "115 steps to the summit."[43] ] I must reduce the size of this great pyramid to the size of the isolated rock that the Cathedral is said to occupy. The difficulty of getting rid of the earth that composed these forty artificial mountains does not seem to have troubled historians so much as it would a contractor. I have often thought that those hillocks of earth on the north side of the town were once small artificial mounds on which the Indians offered their worship, for in the canal near by was found that collection of clay divinities of which I have already spoken.
The difficulty in the way of forming a correct idea of that old city, is owing to the defective character of our witnesses. The one confesses to the habitual practice of falsehood for the purpose of deceiving the Indians; the other acknowledges practices that render the character of both infamous, and would make their testimony of no weight in a court of justice unless corroborated. We must therefore feel our way as best we can.
With the rude implements of the Indians, houses of the driest blocks of mud, though covered with cement and painted with colored wash, could easily have been thrown down; but gunpowder or iron bars would have been necessary to overturn a wall composed either of stone or tepetate and cement. Villages built of dried mud are often imposing in their appearance, and are yet most perishable; for the first overflow of waters, that shall cover but a few inches of the walls of the houses, will in a few hours reduce a whole village to a mass of ruins. Again, the dry wall that has fallen becomes saturated, and dissolves itself into soft mud. My hypothesis is, therefore, not without its difficulty, for at every inundation of the city in the times of the Aztecs we have to suppose it totally destroyed; an evil that could not be remedied until the water had entirely subsided, and new mud had been formed into blocks and dried in the sun, and a new village or city built every twenty-five years.
To sum up my theory of Aztec civilization: they had earthen gods, earthen cooking utensils, and earthen aqueducts; their temples were small buildings, upon moderately-sized Indian burial mounds, and their palaces and sacred inclosures were of dried mud, and of a single story in height.
THE TOLTECS.
With this solution, the difficulty that occurred to Humboldt is in part removed, viz., that the allotted time—one hundred and seventy years—was too short a period in which to transform a tribe of North American Indians into a settled community. The remainder of the difficulty is explained by an event taking place in our own days. It is hardly thirty years since the Apache Indians began the systematic plunder of the northern states of Mexico, and now even these nomades begin to show the first glimmerings of civilization. Their captives teach them the use of much of the plunder they have brought to their own villages. Though their treatment of female captives is inhuman, yet it is not an uncommon thing for a captive to become a wife, and to introduce into her wigwam, and to inculcate upon the minds of her children, a few of the primary ideas of civilization. It is the commonly received notion that the Toltecs abandoned the table-land about the time of the arrival of the Aztecs, but continued to flourish in the region of the Gulf coast and in other parts of the hot country; that the vast ruins which abound in those regions were inhabited cities till within a few generations of the coming of the Spaniards; and that in Yucatan, the part most distant from Mexico, that civilization continued quite down to that period; that for a great portion of the one hundred and seventy years of their national existence, the Aztecs kept up predatory excursions into the Toltec region, and out of its dense population derived an inexhaustible supply of slaves and the plunder of civilization, included in which may have been the best wrought of the stone idols that are still preserved. So that the Aztec civilization resolves itself into the very ancient civilization of the Toltecs.
PYRAMID OF PAPANTLA.
We have removed to a greater antiquity, but have not got rid of the question of the origin of Mexican civilization. The year 600, named by Humboldt, may be considered as the time of their appearance on the table-land; out many of the ruins in the hot country might claim a thousand years earlier antiquity. These massive remains must have stood, abandoned as they are now, in the midst of the forest, for a long time before the Conquest, as their very existence was unknown to the Spaniards until near the close of the last century. The close resemblance between the apparently most ancient of these works, and those of the Egyptianss and other Eastern civilizations, does not involve the idea of a common origin or of intercourse, but only leads to the suggestion that the human race, in its progress, naturally follows the same path, whether upon the eastern or western continent, and that it is separated by a cycle of thousands of years from the civilization of our day. As a specimen of the works of the Toltecs, I insert a sketch of the pyramid of Papantla.
