the spoils of the Aztecs."

An instant of breathless silence followed, then somebody shouted. A
hundred voices took up the cry,--

"To Mexico! To Mexico!"

Of the adventures, the fighting, the wonderful sights and the narrow
escapes of the march to the capital, Bernal Diaz, who was with the army,
wrote afterward in bulky volumes. On the seventh day of November, 1519,
the compact little force of Spaniards, little more than a battalion in
all, with their Indian allies from the provinces which had rebelled
against the Emperor, came in sight of the capital. The moment at which
Cortes, at the head of his followers, rode into the city of Mexico is
one of the most dramatic in all history. Nothing in any novel of
adventure compares with it in amazing contrast or tragic possibilities.
The men of the Age of Cannon met the men of the Age of Stone. The mighty
Catholic Church confronted a nation of snake-worshiping cannibals. The
sons of a race that lived in hardy simplicity, a race of fighters, had
come into a capital where life was more luxurious than it was in
Seville, Paris or Rome--a heathen capital rich in beauty, wealth and all
the arts of a barbarian people.

The city had been built on an island in the middle of a salt lake,
reached by three causeways of masonry four or five miles long and twenty
or thirty feet wide. At the end near the city each causeway had a wooden
drawbridge. There were paved streets and water-ways. The houses, built
around large court-yards, were of red stone, sometimes covered with
white stucco. The roofs were encircled with battlements and defended
with towers. Often they were gardens of growing flowers. In the center
of the city was the temple enclosure, surrounded by an eight-foot stone
wall. Within this were a score of teocallis, or pyramids flattened at
the top, the largest, that of the war-god, being about a hundred feet
high. Stone stairs wound four times around the pyramid, so that
religious processions appeared and disappeared on their way to the top.
On the summit was a block of jasper, rounded at top, the altar of human
sacrifice. Near by were the shrines and altars of the gods. Outside the
temple enclosure was a huge altar, or embankment, called the
tzompantli, one hundred and fifty-four feet long, upon which the skulls
of innumerable victims were arranged. The doorways and walls everywhere
were carved with the two symbols of the Aztec religion--the cross and
the snake. Among the birds