CHAPTER XXXIII.
The soldiers of Alvarado differed in no wise from those veterans whom Don Amador had found standing to their arms on the banks of the River of Canoes; only that they presented, notwithstanding their loudly vented delight, a care-worn and somewhat emaciated appearance,—the consequence of long watches, perpetual fears, and, in part, of famine. They broke their ranks, as has been said, as soon as they beheld their general, and surrounded him with every expression of affection; and, while stretching forth their hands with cries of gratitude and joy, invoked many execrations on their imperial prisoner, the helpless Montezuma, as the cause of all their sufferings. Among them, Don Amador took notice of one man, who, though armed and habited as a Spaniard, seemed, in most other respects, an Indian, and of a more savage race than any he had yet seen; for his face, hands, and neck were tattooed with the most fantastic figures, and his motions were those of a barbarian. This was Geronimo de Aguilar, a companion of Balboa, who, being wrecked on the coast of Yucatan, had been preserved as a slave, and finally, adopted as a warrior, among the hordes of that distant land; from which he was rescued by Don Hernan,—happily to serve as the means of communication, through the medium of another and more remarkable interpreter, with the races of Mexico. This other interpreter, who approached the general with the dignified gravity of an Indian princess, and was received with suitable respect, was no less a person than that maid of Painalla, sold by an unfeeling parent a slave to one of the chieftains of Tobasco, presented by him to Cortes, and baptized in the faith under the distinguished title of the señora Doña Marina; who, by interpreting to Aguilar, in the language of Yucatan, the communications that were made in her native tongue, thus gave to Cortes the means of conferring with her countrymen, until her speedy acquisition of the Castilian language removed the necessity of such tedious intervention. But at this period, many Spaniards had acquired a smattering of her tongue, and could play the part of interpreters; and, for this reason, Doña Marina will make no great figure in this history. Other annalists have sufficiently immortalized her beauty, her wisdom, and her fidelity; and it has been her good fortune, continued even to this day, to be distinguished with such honours as have fallen to the lot of none of her masters. Her Christian denomination, Marina, converted by her countrymen into Malintzin, (a title that was afterwards scornfully applied by them to Cortes himself,) and this again, in modern days, corrupted by the Creoles into Malinche, has had the singular fate to give name both to a mountain and a divinity: the sierra of Tlascala is now called the mountain of Malinche; and the descendants of Montezuma pay their adorations to the Virgin, under the title of Malintzin.
Don Amador de Leste, attended by De Morla, as well as his new acquaintance, Alvarado, was able to understand, as well as admire, many of the wonders of the city, as he now, for the first time, planted his foot on its imperial streets.
The retreat of the salt waters of Tezcuco has left the present republican city of Mexico a full league west of the lake. In the days of Montezuma, it stood upon an island two miles removed from the western shore, with which it communicated by the dike or calzada of Tlacopan,—now called Tacuba. The causeway of Iztapalapan, coming from the South, seven miles in length, passed over the island and through the city, and was continued in a line three miles further to the northern shore, and to the city Tepejacac, where now stand the church and the miraculous picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Besides these three great causeways, constructed with inconceivable labour, there were two others,—that of Cojohuacan, which, as we have mentioned, terminated in the greater one of Iztapalapan, at the military point Xoloc, a half league from the city; and that, a little south-ward of the dike of Tacuba, which conveyed, in aqueducts of earthenware, the pure waters of Chapoltepec to the temples and squares of the imperial city. The island was circular, saving that a broad angle or peninsula ran out from the north-west, and a similar one from the opposite point of the compass: it was a league in diameter; but the necessities of the people, after covering this ample space with their dwellings, extended them far into the lake; and perhaps as many edifices stood, on piles, in the water as on the land. The causeways of Iztapalapan and Tacuba, intersecting each other in the heart of the island, divided the city into four convenient quarters, to which a fifth was added, some few generations before, when the little kingdom of Tlatelolco, occupying the north-western peninsula, was added to Tenochtitlan. On this peninsula and in this quarter of Tlatelolco, stood the palace of an ancient king, which the munificence of Montezuma had presented to Cortes for a dwelling, and which the invader, six days after the gift, by an act of as much treachery as daring, converted into the prison of his benefactor.
The appearance of this vast and remarkable city so occupied the mind of the neophyte, that, as he rode staring along, he gave but few thoughts, and fewer words, either to his kinsman or the page. It was sunset, and in the increasing obscurity, he gazed, as if on a scene of magic, on streets often having canals in the midst, covered alike with bridges and empty canoes; on stone houses, low indeed, but of a strong and imposing structure, over the terraces of which waved shrubs and flowers; and on high turrets, which, at every vista, disclosed their distant pinnacles. But he remarked also, and it was mentioned by the cavaliers at his side as a bad omen, that neither the streets, the canals, nor the house-tops presented the appearance of citizens coming forth to gaze upon them. A few Indians were now and then seen skulking at a distance in the streets, raising their heads from a half-concealed canoe, or peering from a terrace among the shrubs. He would have thought the city uninhabited, but that he knew it contained as many living creatures, hidden among its retreats, as some of the proudest capitals of Christendom. Even the great square, the centre of life and of devotion, was deserted; and the principal pyramid, a huge and mountainous mass, consecrated to the most sanguinary of deities, though its sanctuaries were lighted by the ever-blazing urns, and though the town of temples circumscribed by the great Coatepantli, or Wall of Serpents, which surrounded this Mexican Olympus, sent up the glare of many a devotional torch,—yet did it seem, nevertheless, to be inhabited by beings as inanimate as those monstrous reptiles which writhed in stone along the infernal wall. In this light, and in that which still played in the west, Don Amador marvelled at the structure of the pyramid, and cursed it as he marvelled. It consisted of five enormous platforms, faced with hewn stone, and mounted by steps so singularly planned, that, upon climbing the first story, it was necessary to walk entirely round the mass, before arriving at the staircase which conducted to the second. The reader may conceive of the vast size of this pagan temple by being apprised, that, to ascend it, the votaries were compelled, in their perambulations, to walk a distance of full ten furlongs, as well as to climb a hundred and fourteen different steps. He may also comprehend the manner in which the stairways were contrived, by knowing that the first, ascending laterally from the corner, was just as broad as the first platform was wider than the second; leaving thus a sheer and continuous wall from the ground to the top of the second terrace, from the bottom of the second to the top of the third, and so on, in like manner, to the top.
But the pyramid, crowned with altars and censers, the innumerable temples erected in honour of nameless deities at its foot, and the strange and most hideous Coatepantli, were not the only objects which excited the abhorrence of the cavalier. Without the wall, and a few paces in advance of the great gate which it covered as a curtain, rose a rampart of earth or stone, oblong and pyramidal, but truncated, twenty-five fathoms in length at the base, and perhaps thirty feet in height. At either end of this tumulus, was a tower of goodly altitude, built, as it seemed at a distance and in the dim light, of some singularly rude and uncouth material; and between them, occupying the whole remaining space of the terrace, was a sort of frame-work or cage of slender poles, on all of which were strung thickly together, certain little globes, the character of which Don Amador could not penetrate, until fully abreast of them. Then, indeed, he perceived, with horror, that these globes were the skulls of human beings, the trophies of ages of superstition; and beheld, in like manner, that the towers which crowned the Golgotha, (or Huitzompan, as it was called in the Mexican tongue,) were constructed of the same dreadful materials, cemented together with lime. The malediction which he invoked upon the builders of the ghastly temple, was unheard; for the spectacle froze his blood and paralyzed his tongue.
It was not yet dark, when, having left these haunts of idolatry, Don Amador found himself entering into the court-yard of a vast, and yet not a very lofty, building,—the palace of Axajacatl; wherein, with drums beating, and trumpets answering joyously to the salute of their friends, stood those individuals of the garrison who had remained to watch over their prisoners and treasures. The weary and the curious, thronging together impatiently at the gate, mingling with the garrison and some two thousand faithful Tlascalans, who had been left by Cortes as their allies, and who now rushed forward to salute the viceroy of their gods, as some had denominated Don Hernan, made such a scene of confusion, that, for a moment, the neophyte was unable to ride into the yard. In that moment, and while struggling both to appease the unquiet of Fogoso, and to drive away the feathered herd that obstructed him, his arm was touched, and, looking down, he beheld Jacinto at his side, greatly agitated, and seemingly striving to disengage himself from the throng.
"Give me thy hand," cried Don Amador, "and I will pull thee out of this rabble to the back of Fogoso."
But the page, though he seized upon the hand of his patron, and covered it with kisses, held back, greatly to the surprise of Don Amador, who was made sensible that hot tears were falling with the kisses.