s
invaders, yet showing in their dwelling-rooms and estufas marks of
careful building and tasteful adornment.[95]

[Footnote 93: At least a better one than Mr. Prescott had when
he naively reckoned five persons to a household, _Conquest of
Mexico_, ii. 97.]

[Footnote 94: Morgan, _Houses and House-Life_, chap. vii.]

[Footnote 95: For careful descriptions of the ruined pueblos
and cliff-houses, see Nadaillac's _Prehistoric America_, chap.
v., and Short's _North Americans of Antiquity_, chap. vii. The
latter sees in them the melancholy vestiges of a people
gradually "succumbing to their unpropitious surroundings--a
land which is fast becoming a howling wilderness, with its
scourging sands and roaming savage Bedouin--the Apaches."]

[Sidenote: Pueblo of Zuni.]

The pueblo of Zuni is a more extensive and complex structure than the
ruined pueblos on the Chaco river. It is not so much an enormous
communal house as a small town formed of a number of such houses crowded
together, with access from one to another along their roof-terraces.
Some of the structures are of adobe brick, others of stone embedded in
adobe mortar and covered with plaster. There are two open plazas or
squares in the town, and several streets, some of which are covered ways
passing beneath the upper stories of houses. The effect, though not
splendid, must be very picturesque, and would doubtless astonish and
bewilder visitors unprepared for such a sight. When Coronado's men
discovered Zuni in 1540, although that style of building was no longer a
novelty to them, they compared the place to Granada.

[Sidenote: Pueblo of Tlascala.]

Now it is worthy of note that Cortes made the same comparison in the
case of Tlascala, one of the famous towns at which he stopped on his
march from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico. In his letter to the emperor
Charles V., he compared Tlascala to Granada, "affirming that it was
larger, stronger, and more populous than the Moorish capital at the time
of the conquest, and quite as well built."[96] Upon this Mr. Prescott
observes, "we shall be slow to believe that its edifices could have
rivalled those monuments of Oriental magnificence, whose light aerial
forms still survive after the lapse of ages, the admiration of every
traveller of sensibility and taste. The truth is that Cortes, like
Columbus, saw objects through the war