Midway across the continent of North America, where it narrows towards a point between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, the civilisation of the New World appears to have converged at the close of the fifteenth century. Here the traveller from the Atlantic coast, after passing through gorgeous tropical flowers and aromatic shrubs of the deadly tierra caliente, emerges at length into a purer atmosphere. The vanilla, the indigo, and flowering cacao-groves are gradually left behind. The sugar-cane and the banana next disappear; and he looks down through the gorges of the elevated tierra templada on the vegetation of the tropics, carpeting, and scenting with its luscious but deadly odours, the region which stretches along the Mexican Gulf. Higher still are regions where the wheat and other grains of Europe’s temperate zone replace the tall native maize; until at length he enters the tierra fria: climbing a succession of terraces representing every zone of temperature, till he rests on the summit of the Cordillera. Beyond this the volcanic peaks of the Andes tower into the regions of perpetual snow; while the traveller crosses the once thickly-wooded table-land into the valley of Mexico: an oval basin about sixty-seven leagues in circumference, and elevated beyond the deadly malaria and enervating heat of the coast, into a temperate climate, nearly seven thousand five hundred feet above the sea. Here, encompassed by the salt marshes of the Tezcucan Lake, stood the ancient Tenochtitlan or Mexico, “The Venice of the Aztecs.”
In the month of October 1519, Don Diego de Ordaz effected the ascent of the volcanic Popocatepetl, from whence he beheld the valley of Mexico with its curious chain of lakes; and caught a glimpse of the far-famed capital of Montezuma, with its white towers and pyramidal teocallis reflecting back the sun from their stuccoed walls. The scene seemed to realise such a dream of romance as Bernal Diaz reports of Cempoal: “The Buildings,” he says, “having been lately whitewashed and plastered, one of our horsemen was so struck with the splendour of their appearance in the sun, that he came back in full speed to Cortes to tell him that the walls of the houses were of silver!” The men of that generation which witnessed the discoveries of mighty empires, and an El Dorado beyond the known limits of the world, had their imaginations expanded to the reception of any conceivable wonders. Sir Thomas More constructed his Utopia out of such materials; and Othello styles his wonderful relations “of antres vast and deserts idle,” a “traveller’s history.”
The poetical imagination of Columbus was one of the sources of his power, whereby he anticipated with undoubting faith the realisation of his grand life-work. But from the position in which Cortes was placed, it was his interest to give currency to the highly-coloured visions of his first pioneers, rather than to transmit to Europe the colder narrative of matured experience. Approaching the Mexican capital, he exclaims in his first burst of enthusiasm: “We could compare it to nothing but the enchanted scenes we had read of in Amadis de Gaul, from the great towers and temples, and other edifices of lime and stone which seemed to rise up out of the water.” To achieve the recognised mastery of this scene of enchantment, he had not only to conquer its Mexican lords, but to defeat his Spanish foes, and to win to his side that Emperor who, while shaping Europe’s history in one of its mightiest revolutions, could control the destinies of the New World. When reading the accounts transmitted to Spain of the gorgeous treasures of Montezuma’s palaces, we have to bear in remembrance that the treasures themselves perished in the retreat of the noche triste, as the city itself vanished in the final siege and capture. The very dreams of an excited imagination could become realities of the past to the narrators themselves, when every test of their truth had been swept away.
On the 9th of November 1519, Cortes made his first entry into the capital of Montezuma, and from thence he wrote to the Emperor Charles v., giving an account of the Indian metropolis, with its palaces and stately mansions, far surpassing in grandeur and beauty the ancient Moorish capital of Cordova. Conduits of solid masonry supplied the city with water, and furnished means of maintaining hanging-gardens luxurious as those of ancient Babylon. “There is one place,” says Cortes, “somewhat inferior to the rest, attached to which is a beautiful garden with balconies extending over it, supported by marble columns, and having a floor formed of jasper elegantly inlaid”; and he adds, “Within the city, the palaces of the cacique Montezuma are so wonderful that it is hardly possible to describe their beauty and extent. I can only say that in Spain there is nothing equal to them.” The population of ancient Mexico, “the greatest and noblest city of the whole New World,” as Cortes styles it, amounted, according to the lowest computation of its conquerors, to three hundred thousand; and its streets and canals were illuminated at night by the blaze from the altars of numberless teocallis that reared their pyramidal summits in the streets and squares of what Prescott fitly calls “this city of enchantment.” Vast causeways, defended by drawbridges, and wide enough for ten or twelve horsemen to ride abreast, attracted the admiring wonder of the Spaniards by the skill and geometrical precision with which they were constructed. “The great street facing the southern causeway was wide, and extended some miles in nearly a straight line through the centre of the city. A spectator standing at one end of it, as his eye ranged along the deep vista of temples, terraces, and gardens, might clearly discern the other, with the blue mountains in the distance, which, in the transparent atmosphere of the table-land, seemed almost in contact with the buildings.”[[93]] Near the centre of the city rose a huge pyramidal pile, dedicated to the war-god of the Aztecs, the tutelary deity of the city: second in size only to the great pyramid-temple of Cholula, and occupying the area on which now stands the Cathedral of modern Mexico. Beyond the Lake of Tezcuco stood the rival capital of that name, resplendent with a corresponding grandeur and magnificence; and the whole Mexican valley burst on the eyes of the conquerors as a beautiful vision, glittering with towns and villages, with rich gardens, and broad lakes crowded with the canoes of a thriving and busy populace.
Three centuries and a half have intervened since Cortes entered the gorgeous capital of Montezuma; and what remains now of its ancient splendour, of the wonders of its palaces, the massive grandeur of its temples, or the cyclopean solidity of its conduits and causeways? Literally, not a vestige. The city of Constantine has preserved, in spite of all the destructive vicissitudes of siege and overthrow, enduring memorials of the grandeur that pertained to the Byzantine capital more than a thousand years ago. Rome has been sacked by Goth, Hun, Lombard, and Frank; yet memorials not only of three or four centuries, but of generations before the Christian era, survive. Even Jerusalem appears to have some stones of her ancient walls still left one upon another. In spite, therefore, of the narrative of desolating erasure which describes to us the final siege and capture of Mexico, we must assume its edifices and causeways to have been for the most part more slight and fragile than the description of its conquerors implies, or some evidences of such extensive and solid masonry must have survived to our time. Yet if we look in vain for its architectural remains, evidence of another kind shows what its civilisation really was. Mr. Tylor describes the ploughed fields around it as yielding such abundance of obsidian arrow-heads, pottery, and clay figures, that it is impossible to tread on any spot where there is no relic of old Mexico within reach. He left England full of doubts as to the credibility of the historians of the conquest; but personal observation inclines him rather “to blame the chroniclers for having had no eyes for the wonderful things that surrounded them.”[[94]]
One trustworthy memorial of this native civilisation is the famous Calendar Stone: a huge circular block of dark porphyry, disinterred in 1790 in the great square of Mexico, which discloses evidence of progress in astronomical science altogether wonderful in a people among whom civilisation was in other respects so partially developed. The Mexicans had a solar year of 365 days divided into eighteen months of twenty days each, with the five complementary days added to the last. The discrepancy between the actual time of the sun’s annual path through the heavens and their imperfect year, was regulated by the intercalation of thirteen days at the end of every fifty-second year. According to Gama, who differs from Humboldt on this point, the civil day was divided into sixteen parts; and he conceives the Calendar to have been constructed as a vertical sundial. Mexican drawings also indicate that the Aztecs were acquainted with the cause of eclipses. But beyond this our means of ascertaining the extent of their astronomical knowledge fail; while there is proof that their inquiries were zealously directed to the more favoured speculations of the astrologer, which have supplanted true science in all primitive stages of society. Mr. Stephens drew attention to
Fig. 74.—Mask, Mexican Calendar Stone.
points of correspondence between the central device on the Calendar Stone, and a mask, with widely expanded eyes and tongue hanging out, prominent in the curious sacrificial scene sculptured on the Casa de Piedra at Palenque. But the correspondence amounts to little more than this, that each is a gigantic mask with protruding tongue. That of the Calendar Stone is engraved here from a cast brought home by Mr. Bullock, and now in the Collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The statues dug up along with it on the site of the great teocalli of Mexico, were buried in the court of the University, to place them beyond reach of the idolatrous rites which the Indians were inclined to pay to them. At the solicitation of Mr. Bullock they were again disinterred, to admit of his obtaining casts; and he furnishes this interesting account of the sensation excited by the restoration to light of the largest and most celebrated of the Mexican deities:—“During the time it was exposed, the court of the University was crowded with people, most of whom expressed the most decided anger and contempt. Not so, however, all the Indians. I attentively marked their countenances. Not a smile escaped them, or even a word. All was silence and attention. In reply to a joke of one of the students, an old Indian remarked, ‘It is very true we have three very good Spanish gods, but we might still have been allowed to keep a few of those of our ancestors!’ And I was informed that chaplets of flowers had been placed on the figure by natives who had stolen thither unseen in the evening.”[[95]]
