ff to Tlacupa, and we only considered ourselves safe when assured
they had left the causeway.

In this engagement we slew a great number of the enemy, and among the
many men we took prisoners there were four personages of high rank.

By this time the reader will certainly be wearied of reading of battles
which were every day renewed; but I have not exaggerated them, for
during the ninety-three days we lay before this great and strong city,
we were compelled to fight both day and night almost without
intermission; and certainly, of all these numerous engagements, I am at
least bound to mention the most striking occurrences. If I were desirous
of relating every circumstance I should never finish, and my book would
resemble 'Amadis de Gaule,' and other such romances, whose authors can
find no end to their pretty stories. I will, however, be as brief as
possible in my further account of this siege, and hasten on to St.
Hippolytus' day, when we subdued this vast city, and took
Quauhtemoctzin, with all his generals, prisoners. But, before we were so
far successful, we suffered great hardships, and the whole of us were
near perishing in the attempt, particularly the division under Cortes,
as the reader will shortly see.

CHAPTER CLII.

_How the Mexicans defeated Cortes, and took sixty-two of his men
prisoners, who were sacrificed to their idols; our general himself
being wounded in the leg._

Cortes, finding at length that it was impossible to fill up all the
canals, gaps, and openings in the causeway, and that the Mexicans always
destroyed at night what we had completed in the day, reopening the
apertures we had filled up, and throwing up new entrenchments, called
the principal officers of his division together, to deliberate on the
present state of the siege. He told them the men would not be able to
continue this fatiguing mode of warfare much longer, and he therefore
proposed to them that the three divisions should fall upon the city at
the same moment, and fight their way up to the Tlatelulco, and there
encamp with the troops. Cortes at the same time wrote to Alvarado and
Sandoval, desiring them also to deliberate on this point with their
officers and soldiers. From that place, he added, they would be able to
attack the enemy in the streets, and not have to encounter such severe
engagements, or make those dangerous retreats every evening, nor have
everlastingly to toil in filling up the openings a