pass through the water-gate,
out from which we had come so gallantly so short a time before, and
thence went onward across the basin to the very pier that we had
started from with such high hopes to gather the forces for the rebellion
that had come to so sorry an end.

All the water-side was black with the crowd that had gathered to watch
our landing; but, considering that these people were there to welcome a
victorious army, it seemed to me that they were strangely still and
dull. There was, to be sure, no lack of yelling, but it came for the
most part from a company of priests clustered on the pier where we
landed, and from the soldiers and oarsmen in the boats--not from the
townsfolk at large. And when we were marched upward through the
city--following the same street that we had fought our way along when
last we traversed it--I saw in the crowd so many sullen and dejected
faces that it seemed to me there still was in that city a good deal of
material for the making of another mutiny.

This time we were not taken to the house in which we had met the Priest
Captain, and whence we had been delivered from imprisonment by Tizoc's
gallant rescue of us; but, passing a little beyond this house, we were
led up a broad stair-way to the plateau which crowned the city, and on
which stood the great Treasure-house that also was the temple in which
the Aztlanecas housed their most venerated gods. And I confess that my
delight at seeing closely this building, that until then I had beheld
only from afar off, for a time completely overcame the dread and sorrow
that had oppressed me; and the very strongest desire that stirred within
me just then was for a tape-measure and a pair of compasses and a steel
square, together with the opportunity to fall to work with these several
instruments upon those mighty walls. Indeed, I almost had forgotten that
I was a prisoner, and was like to die soon a very dreadful death, when a
groan that poor Rayburn gave--wrung from him by the pain that he
suffered in being carried up the stairs--recalled me suddenly to a
realizing sense of our situation, and so pressed home upon me the sad
conviction that the science of archaeology would gain nothing of all that
I might see or learn during the little while that I should remain alive.

The outer facing of the plateau, like that of the terraces below it, was
a prodigiously heavy wall of squared stones set in cement; and for a
coping this wall had great ston