in a
box, and when we arrive the voyage begins.

The crew are ten in number; the captain, eight men, and an old woman in
charge of the tortillas and the pulque-jar. All these are brown people;
in fact, the navigation of the lakes is entirely in the hands of the
Indians, and "reasonable people" have nothing to do with it. Reasonable
people--"gente de razon"--being, as I have said before, those who have
any white blood in them; and republican institutions have not in the
least effaced the distinction.

So it comes to pass that the canoe-traffic is carried on in much the
same way as it was in Montezuma's time. There is one curious
difference, however. These canoes are all poled about the lakes and
canals; and I do not think we saw an Indian oar or paddle in the whole
valley of Mexico. In the ancient picture-writings, however, the Indians
are paddling their canoes with a kind of oar, shaped at the end like
one of our fire-shovels. But, as we have seen, the distribution of land
and water has altered since those days; and the lakes, far greater in
extent, were of course several feet deeper all over the present beds;
and even at a short distance from the city poling would have been
impossible. I suspect that the Aztecs originally used both poles and
paddles, and that the latter went out of use when the water became
shallow enough for the pole to serve all purposes. Otherwise, we must
suppose that the Mexicans, since the Spanish Conquest, introduced a new
invention; which is not easy to believe.

We had first to get out of the canal, and fairly out into the lake.
This was the more desirable, as the canal is one of the drains of the
city, an office that it fills badly enough, seeing that there is
scarcely any fall of water from the lower quarters of the city to the
lake. I never saw water-snakes in numbers to compare with those in the
canal, and by the side of it. They were swimming in the water,
wriggling in and out; and on the banks they were writhing in heaps,
like our passengers forward. Two of our crew tow us along, and we are
soon clear of the canal, and of the salt-swamp that extends on both
sides of it, where the bottom of the lake was in old times. Once fairly
out, we look round us. We see Mexico from a new point of view, and
begin to understand why the Spaniards called it the Venice of the New
World. Even now, though the lake is so much smaller than it was then,
the city, with its domes and battlemented roofs, seems