grateful to the view as they are productive in everything
sown in them, and very orderly and well kept with roads and convenience
for pasturing all sorts of cattle. There is every kind of game in this
country, and animals and birds such as are familiar to us at home....
So that there is no difference between this country and Spain as
regards birds and animals.... According to our judgment it is credible
that there is everything in this country which existed in that from
whence Solomon is said to have brought the gold for the Temple."

Here, for the first time, the Spanish explorers in their wanderings had
come across an organised nation with an advanced civilisation and
polity of its own. The gentle savages they had encountered in the
tropical islands and the mainland of the isthmus had offered little or
no resistance to the white men or to their uncomprehended God. The
little kinglets of Hispaniola, of Cuba, and of Darien, divided,
unsophisticated, and wonder-stricken, with their peoples bent their
necks to the yoke and their backs to the lash almost without a
struggle. Their moist tropical lands, near the coasts, were enervating,
and no united organisation for defence against the enslaving intruders
was possible to them. But here in the land of the Aztec federation
three potent states, with vast dependencies from which countless hordes
of warriors might be drawn, were ready to stand shoulder to shoulder
and resist the claims of the white demi-gods, mounted on strange
beasts, who came upon giant sea-birds from the unknown, beyond the
waste of waters. But the fatal prophecy of the coming of the avenging
white God Quetzalcoatl to destroy the Aztec power paralysed the arm and
brain of Montezuma, and rendered him, and finally his people, a prey to
the diplomacy, the daring, and the valour of Cortes, aided by the
dissentient tribes he enlisted under his banner.

The vast amphibious city of Tenochtitlan, when at length the Conquerors
reached it, confirmed the impression that the land of which it was the
capital was another wider and richer Spain. Its teeming markets, "one
square twice as large as that of Salamanca, all surrounded by arcades,
where there are daily more than sixty thousand souls buying and
selling"; the abundance of food and articles of advanced comfort and
luxury, "the cherries and plums like those of Spain"; "the skeins of
different kinds of spun silk in all colours, that might be from one of
the markets of