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The cavaliers of the Cross
by William Whiteman Fosdick
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Excerpt:
Of these places none are more remarkable than those spots where the ruins of Copan, Palenque, and Tula, stand like so many statues with their extended hands pointing to a wreck from -whence a people has ".mysteriously and silently passed away;" the dumb indexes from whom no answer can be drawn; the speechless marbles which cannot tell the history or fate of those Who reared tljerri; the moss-grown monuments, which stand skeleton like; the organic remains of the past; the petrified survivors of a lost race, like the fabled inhabitants of the city in the Arabian Nights, whose queen turned her subjects to stone by a word: Here is a WTeck, in following out whose
silent and subterranean labyrinths, conjecture loses itself; and here is the scene where, following the footsteps of his fancy, one may chance to see the Spirit of Romance as it glides among the ruins, and hear the echo of longlost voices speaking from the hollow depths of the buried temple and the broken arch.
At the very entrance of this home of Mystery, Truth halts, her staff finding no firm foundation for her foot, and gazing into its dark and shadowy sphere she grows bewildered, and turns once more to the clear, bright scenes of certainty. Therefore, with the light-footed Fancy must we enter these hallowed realms of antiquity and imagination; treading softly through the sacred aisles of her mysterious temples and their tombs, lest we awaken the wrath of the angel that guards the silent sleepers; lightly lifting the ancient volume which holds thoir code of laws, lest in our rude haste to brush away the dust, it crumble in our hands. And gently must the chords of her long silent harp be struck, or perchance it will jar discordant, and be snapped in twain forever.
Then by the beautiful margin of Tezcuco's Elysian lake must the Spirit of Fancy stand and gaze upon the glassy waters, and see mirrored in its depths a shadowy reflection of the cities of Mexico and Tezcuco, as they stood some five centuries since upon the opposite banks of the same lake.
But, alas! the faded glories of that golden age can never be revived; no magic spell can conjure up a clear, consistent history; things can but be seen as in a dream, a fairy pageant, wherein the men are as shadows passing; ghosts, which must be reanimated, and made to enact an imaginary drama of their own existence. The beings of to-day must bo forgotten, and the people of the past must fill their places; the present fabrics on the sites of the9e cities must pass away, and from out their sepulchre of ages, the ancient palaces must rise, not dark with mould, nor green with moss; not crumbled by the canker of decay, but bold and beautiful, the polished masses of masonry which belonged to the most enlightened race of the West. The empire of the Aztecs (by whom the three states, of Mexico, Tezcuco, and Tlacopan, under the general name of Anahuac, was holden), lasted about two hundred years, when it was conquered by the Spaniards under Cortes, being the same territory which had been possessed by the Toltecs, a race that passed mysteriously away, leaving a multitude of monuments which marked them as a mighty and wonderful people who never, according to historians, stained their altars with human blood, nor debased their banquets with the still more horrible custom of cannibalism, as was the case with their Aztec successors, and also to a certain, but much smaller extent, with the Tezcucans. The Toltecs who disappeared so mysteriously and unaccountably, were in all probability, the founders of those vast cities whose solid superstructures of stone, and giant works of architecture, rival in beauty and magnificence, even in their ruins, the mighty wrecks which lie scattered in the desert sands of Egypt: but whence these Toltecs came, or whither they have vanished, must remain forever an inscrutable secret; all that we know, is that a wonderful race, far advanced in civilization, once
held their home in the great valley of Mexico; but when we seek to know their habits and their history, an unseen hand is stretched forth, and an impenetrable curtain of clouds is drawn across the sun of their glory, and we are left standing in double darkness, without a star to light the pathway of oar wanderings.
He who would have seen the Aztec empire in its prime, should have stood, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, upon some pinnacle of that mountain wall which fences in the matchless vale of Mexico; from such a height he might have seen the fair lake of Tezcuco, that miniature salt sea, and the fresh tide of Chalco the sweet water, with other bright sheets of silver, shining along the valley for seventy miles. Into this vale the Aztecs descended in 1325; they had wandered from some far country to the north, and having borne a thousand toils, saw at last, upon the margin of lake Tezcuco, a fair omen, which told them that their pilgrimage was finished; it was an eagle holding a serpent in his claws, as he sat upon a cactus, or nopal. Here, amid the reeds and upon the salt marsh, they laid the foundation of an empire, which, in an existence of three hundred years, rose to the pitch of occidental grandeur with a rapidity unparalleled. Upon the islands of Accocolco, whose bog-like character required them to bring stone from the main land, they planted the first rude huts which were to shield that homeless race from the opulent tribes around, into whose territory they had penetrated, and upon whose terra firma they were not allowed to rest. Years of privation, misery, and hardship, rolled by, and the huts of the wanderers became safe habitations, and handsome houses: the miry marsh was now the firm foundation for solid superstructures, and the arms of the Aztecs had made the name of the poor wanderers among the water-flags a thing for terror and respect. By the beginning of the sixteenth century their sway extended from the Atlantic to the pacific, from the region of the barbarous Otomies upon the north, to the farthest limits of Guatemala upon the south; their language was spoken by seven tribes in and around the great valley; they were the Sochimilcas, Tepanecas, Colhuas, Tlahuicas, Mexicans, and Tlascalans; the latter tribe threw off their allegiance, and repulsed, by repeated defeats, the other six tribes, and established themselves as an independent republic, gome seventy miles from the city of Tenochtitlan, or Mexico, where they remained the rivals for years, and ultimately became the cause of the final overthrow and downfall of the Aztec power.
