into the canals; so that, on the day on which the conquest
was effected, the city ceased to exist. Many times has that old city
been restored, in the imagination of enthusiasts, with its forty
pyramids (_teocallis_) and unnumbered palaces, adorned with all the
luxury and magnificence of the most refined civilization, united with
barbaric grandeur and inhumanity in so strange a combination as to
distract our feelings between hate and admiration.

It was easy to build an Indian city that would present a most imposing
appearance, for the climate was well fitted for drying mud thoroughly.
Besides, there was an inexhaustible supply of pumice-stone
(_tepetate_), and an exceedingly soft, gray quarry stone, for caps and
lintels, with an excellent quality of cement, and material for
"_fresco_ painting" of the walls, abundant and cheap. All these
articles are combined in the building of the modern city, and give it
its present appearance of elegance and great durability. But in the old
city, one-story palaces of dried mud, plastered and frescoed, with
large interior courts like that I have described at Tezcuco, must have
been among the most imposing structures. If _tepetate_ was employed
in the construction of the royal palaces, it would not have added
materially to the weight resting upon the earthy foundations; for when
the water in the ditches occupied half the street,[41] the foundations
must have been so much softer than at present, that structures of the
lightest material only could be borne.

In his anxiety to keep up a resemblance between his conquests and that
of Granada, Cortez calls the _teocallis_, or Indian mounds which he
found, _mosques_, and speaks of "forty towers, the largest of which
has fifty steps leading to its main body, and is higher than the tower
of the principal church in Seville."[42] Bernal Diaz says there were
"115 steps to the summit."[43] I must reduce the size of this great
pyramid to the size of the isolated rock that the Cathedral is said to
occupy. The difficulty of getting rid of the earth that composed these
forty artificial mountains does not seem to have troubled historians so
much as it would a contractor. I have often thought that those hillocks
of earth on the north side of the town were once small artificial
mounds on which the Indians offered their worship, for in the canal
near by was found that collection of clay divinities of which I have
already spoken.

The difficulty in the w