amids of the city, and are borne far over the waters
of the lake, to smite the ears of wondering Indians.

Cortes and his Spaniards rode steadily along the causeway, their hearts
beating--as well they might--with astonishment, admiration,
apprehension, and all those emotions to which their unique and romantic
position gave impulse. Guided by the messengers of Montezuma, the white
men rode beneath a fortification in mid-causeway, where another similar
structure joined it from another shore of the lake, passed the
drawbridge and the city walls, and clattered up the stone-paved avenue
of Tenochtitlan to where, in pomp and splendour, surrounded by his
lords and vassals, the great Aztec chief awaited them, in a royal
litter gleaming with polished gold.

Cortes and his men dropped foot to earth, and Montezuma descended from
his litter. The Spaniard _Conquistador_, after the custom of his race,
advanced to embrace the chief, "but," wrote Cortes to Charles V., "the
two lords in attendance prevented me with their hands that I might not
touch him, and both Montezuma and they performed instead their ceremony
of kissing the ground."

The meeting of these two chiefs--one the autocrat of a strange, unknown
civilisation there in the heart of the mountains, the other the
representative of an equally strange and unknown power from an outside
world, both, to the other, undreamt of--is of dramatic memory. But the
address of Montezuma was singularly dignified, prophetic, or
philosophical. After the presents and greetings were exchanged, and the
monarch and the invader sate at their ease, he spake in this wise: "You
who have come from the direction of the sunrise, from a great lord of
some far regions, shall not lack power here to command, for well we
know as to our ancestry that we are not of the aborigines of this land
where we now dwell, but of that of a great lord--which must be that you
represent--who brought us here in ages past, departed, and promised to
return. Rest here, therefore, and rejoice; take what you will, my house
is yours; but believe not the slanders of my enemies through whose
countries you have journeyed."

So strong was the remarkable tradition of Quetzalcoatl, that it had
held this powerful chief and his warlike people in check before the
invasion of a band of adventurers from abroad. A word of command from
him, and the Spaniards, with all their advantages of firearms and
horses, could never have passed the cause