All the bright beauty of that lovely lake was around us, having for its background the green meadows and the darker green of the forests hanging above them on the upward slopes, and beyond all the towering height of the cliffs, which shaded in their colorings from delicate gray to dark brown, and were touched here and there by patches of black shadow where some great cleft opened; and yet all that we then thought of was that across those blue waters, which gleamed golden in the sunlight, we were going swiftly to a cruel death, and that the cliffs, whereof the beauty was hateful to us, irrevocably shut us in. Which gloomy feelings pressed upon us throughout that dismal passage, while all our oarsmen pulled stoutly together, and we went gliding onward over the sunlit waters towards the evil fate that we knew was waiting for us within the dark walls whereby was encircled the city of Culhuacan.
XXXII.
EL SABIO'S DEFIANCE.
While yet we were a long way off from the city, we heard faintly the yells of triumph with which the watchers above the water-gate gave notice to those within the walls of the return of the victorious army; and from all the boats of our flotilla there went up a shrill chorus of answering yells. Our barge was the first to pass through the water-gate, out from which we had come so gallantly so short a time before, and thence went onward across the basin to the very pier that we had started from with such high hopes to gather the forces for the rebellion that had come to so sorry an end.
All the water-side was black with the crowd that had gathered to watch our landing; but, considering that these people were there to welcome a victorious army, it seemed to me that they were strangely still and dull. There was, to be sure, no lack of yelling, but it came for the most part from a company of priests clustered on the pier where we landed, and from the soldiers and oarsmen in the boats—not from the townsfolk at large. And when we were marched upward through the city—following the same street that we had fought our way along when last we traversed it—I saw in the crowd so many sullen and dejected faces that it seemed to me there still was in that city a good deal of material for the making of another mutiny.
This time we were not taken to the house in which we had met the Priest Captain, and whence we had been delivered from imprisonment by Tizoc's gallant rescue of us; but, passing a little beyond this house, we were led up a broad stair-way to the plateau which crowned the city, and on which stood the great Treasure-house that also was the temple in which the Aztlanecas housed their most venerated gods. And I confess that my delight at seeing closely this building, that until then I had beheld only from afar off, for a time completely overcame the dread and sorrow that had oppressed me; and the very strongest desire that stirred within me just then was for a tape-measure and a pair of compasses and a steel square, together with the opportunity to fall to work with these several instruments upon those mighty walls. Indeed, I almost had forgotten that I was a prisoner, and was like to die soon a very dreadful death, when a groan that poor Rayburn gave—wrung from him by the pain that he suffered in being carried up the stairs—recalled me suddenly to a realizing sense of our situation, and so pressed home upon me the sad conviction that the science of archæology would gain nothing of all that I might see or learn during the little while that I should remain alive.
The outer facing of the plateau, like that of the terraces below it, was a prodigiously heavy wall of squared stones set in cement; and for a coping this wall had great stones carved in the similitude of serpents' heads, with mouths wide open, that instantly recalled to my mind the like enclosure that the Spaniards found surrounding the principal temple in the city of Tenochtitlan—and I had a sudden strong longing that my friend Bandelier might be with me at that moment to see how precisely his very ingenious speculations concerning the snake-wall about the great Teocalli were here confirmed.
Through a portal formed of two huge blocks of stone carved to represent two serpents coiled upon themselves, the heads meeting above in a sort of arch (not a true arch, for each of these serpents was a monolith, and was supported wholly on its own base), we entered the large enclosure before the temple. I was surprised to find—for of such a thing among the ancient Aztecs there is no record—that in the centre of the enclosure the rock had been hewn away in such a fashion as to create a vast amphitheatre; and that this was the place where sacrifice was offered by the priests was shown by the blood-stained altar in the centre of it, to which fragments of flesh also adhered, whence was wafted up to us a dreadful stench that instantly racked us with queasy qualms. Save directly in front of the entrance to the temple, where was a great stone balcony with a smaller balcony below it, all the sides of the amphitheatre were cut in steps, which made, also, benches where the multitude could sit at their ease and behold the bloody work going on in the pit below them; and so enormous was this rock-hewn cavity that fully forty thousand people could at once be seated there. Under the balcony there was visible the entrance to a dark tunnel-like passage, that evidently communicated with the temple, and a smaller passage, not large enough for a man to pass through, slanted downward to where it opened on the terrace below; which last was to drain the blood away, and also to free the amphitheatre from water in the season of rains.
We held our noses as we skirted this shocking place, and we were glad enough when we got beyond it and came to the entrance to the temple—a very noble portal, severely simple, and because of its simplicity the more majestic, in which, as in the whole of the façade, was manifest the grave and sombre Egyptian feeling that I had before observed. Through this we passed into the shadowy interior, lighted by only a few narrow slits cut in the enormously thick walls, where the lofty roof was upheld by a wilderness of columns which opened before us seemingly endless vistas where an eternal twilight reigned. Of interior decoration there was nothing save a broad and simple panelling upon the walls, and the great pillars were mere round monoliths without either bases or capitals.