fans. Animals both wild and tame were offered for sale, and near them,
perhaps, a gang of slaves with collars round their necks. One of the
most attractive features of the market was the display of provisions:
meats of all kinds, domestic poultry, game from the neighboring
mountains, fish from the lakes and streams, fruits in all the delicious
abundance of these temperate regions, green vegetables, and the
unfailing maize."

This market, like hundreds of smaller ones, was of course held every
fifth day--the week of the ancient Mexicans being one-fourth of the
twenty days which constituted the Aztec month. This great market was
comparable to "the periodical fairs in Europe, not as they now exist,
but as they existed in the middle ages," when from the difficulties of
intercommunication they served as the great central marts for commercial
intercourse, exercising a most important and salutary influence on the
community.

One of the Spaniards in the party accompanying Cortes was the historian
Diaz, and his testimony is remarkable:

There were among us soldiers who had been in many parts of the
world, Constantinople and Rome, and through all Italy, and who said
that a market-place so large, so well ordered and regulated, and so
filled with people, they had never seen.

Proceeding next to the great _teocalli_ or Aztec temple, covering the
site of the modern cathedral with part of the market-place and some
adjoining streets, they found it in the midst of a great open space,
surrounded by a high stone wall, ornamented on the outside by figures of
serpents raised in relief, and pierced by huge battlemented gateways
opening on the four principal streets of the capital. The _teocalli_
itself was a solid pyramidal structure of earth and pebbles, coated on
the outside with hewn stones, the sides facing the cardinal points. It
was divided into five stories, each of smaller dimensions than that
immediately below. The ascent was by a flight of steps on the outside,
which reached to the narrow terrace at the bottom of the second story,
passing quite round the building, when a second stairway conducted to a
similar landing at the base of the third. Thus the visitor was obliged
to pass round the whole edifice four times in order to reach the top.
This had a most imposing effect in the religious ceremonials, when the
pompous procession of priests with their wild minstrelsy came sweeping
round the huge sides of the p