"Speak not above thy breath!—The curs, that are hungering after the blood of the betrayed Mexicans, would not scorn to blunt their appetites on the flesh of the Moor. Have thyself in readiness at a moment's warning: Our destinies are written—God will not always frown upon us!"
"Dear father!" muttered Jacinto, "we are of the Spaniards' faith, and we will go back to our country."
"It cannot be!—never can it be!" said Abdalla, in tones that were not the less impressive for being uttered in a whisper. "The hills of thy childhood, the rivers of thy love—they are passed away from thee;—think of them no more;—never more shalt thou see them! In the land of barbarians, heaven has willed that we should live and die; and be thou reconciled to thy fate, for it shall be glorious! We live not for ourselves; God brings us hither, and for great ends! To night, did I—Hah!"—(One of the sleepers stirred in the passage.)—"Seek some occasion to speak with me, to-morrow, on the march," whispered Abdalla in the page's ear; and then, with a gesture for silence, he immediately retired.
"Fuego! Quien pasea alli?" grumbled the voice of Lazaro, as he raised his head from the floor. "Fu! el muchacho!—I am ever dreaming of that cursed Turk, that was at my weasand, when Baltasar brained him with the boll of his cross-bow. Laus tibi, Christe!—I have a throat left for snoring." And comforting himself with this assurance, before Jacinto had yet vanished from the passage, the man-at-arms again slumbered on his mat.
CHAPTER XXV.
In the prosecution of his purpose, our historian, the worthy Don Cristobal Ixtlilxochitl, though ever adhering to his 'neglected cavaliers' with a generous constancy, is sometimes seduced into the description of events and scenes of a more general character, not very necessarily connected with his main object, and which those very authors whom he censures, have made the themes of much prolix writing. The difficulties that beset an historian are ever very great; nor is the least of them found in the necessity of determinating how much, or how little, he is called upon to record; for though it seems but reasonable he should take it for granted that his readers are entirely unacquainted with the matters he is narrating, and therefore that he should say all that can be said, this is a point in which all readers will not entirely agree with him. Those who have acquired a smattering of his subject, will be offended, if he presume to reinstruct them. For our own part, not recognizing the right of the ignorant to be gratified at the expense of the more learned, we have studied as much as is possible, so to curtail the exuberances of our original as to present his readers chiefly with what they cannot know; for which reason, it will be found, we have eschewed many of the memorable incidents of this famous campaign, in which none of the neglected conquerors bore a considerable part; as well as all those minute descriptions which retard the progress of the history. We therefore despatch in a word the glories of the morning that dawned over Tlascala, the gathering together of the Spaniards, who, upon review, were found to muster full thirteen hundred men, and their savage allies, two thousand in number, commanded, as had been anticipated, by Talmeccahua of the tribe Tizatlan.
Amid the roar of trumpets and drums, and the shouts of a vast people, the glittering and feathered army departed from Tlascala, and pursuing its way through those rich savannas covered with the smiling corn and the juicy aloe, which had gained for this valley its name of the Land of Bread, proceeded onwards towards the holy city, Cholula.
What rocky plains were crossed and what rough sierras surmounted, it needs not to detail: before night-fall, the whole army moved over the meadows that environ Cholula; and there, where now the traveller sees naught but a few wretched natives squatting among their earthen cabins, the adventurers beheld a city of great size, with more than four hundred lofty white towers shining over its spacious dwellings. The magnificent mountains that surrounded it—the sublime Popocatepetl, still breathing forth its lurid vapours,—the forbidding Iztaccihuatl, or the White Woman, looking like the shattered ruins of some fallen planet, vainly concealing their deformities under a vestment of snow,—the sharp and serrated Malinche,—and last (and seen with not the less interest that it intercepted the view towards home,)—the kingly Orizaba, looking peaceful and grand in the east,—made up such a wall of beauty and splendour as does not often confine the valleys of men. But there is one mountain in that singular scene, which human beings will regard with even more interest than those peaks which soar so many weary fathoms above it: the stupendous Teocalli—the Monte hecho á manos, (for it was piled up by the hands of human beings,)—reared its huge bulk over the plain; and, while looking on the stately cypresses that shadowed its gloomy summit, men dreamed, as they dream yet, of the nations who raised so astonishing an evidence of their power, without leaving any revealment of their fate. Whence came they? whither went they? From the shadows—back to the shadows.—The farce of ambition, the tragedy of war, so many thousand times repeated in the three great theatres that divided the old world, were performed with the same ceremonies of guilt and misery, with the same glory and the same shame, in a fourth, of which knowledge had not dreamed. The same superstitions which heaped up the pyramids and the Parthenon, were at work on the Teocallis of America; and the same pride which built a Babylon to defy the assaults of time, gave to his mouldering grasp the tombs and the palaces of Palenque. The people of Tenochtitlan and Cholula worshipped their ancient gods among the ruined altars of an older superstition.
Great crowds issued from this city—the Mecca of Anahuac—to witness the approach of the Spaniards; but although they bore the same features, and the same decorations, though perhaps of a better material, with the Tlascalans, it was observed by Don Amador, that they displayed none of the joy and triumph, with which his countrymen had been ushered into Tlascala. In place of these, their countenances expressed a dull curiosity; and though they kissed the earth and flung the incense, as usual, in their manner of salutation, they seemed impelled to these ceremonies more by fear than affection. He remarked also with some surprise, that when they came to extend their compliments to the allies,—the Tlascalans, from their chief down to the meanest warrior, requited them only with frowns. All these peculiarities were explained to him by De Morla: