the directions
of their chiefs, and, after sojourning at various places on the way for
the space of one hundred and twenty-four years, arrived at the banks of
a river in the vale of Mexico, where they built the city of Tula, the
capital of the Toltecan kingdom, near the site of the present city of
Mexico.

Their monarchy lasted nearly four centuries, during which they
multiplied, extended their population, and built numerous and large
cities; but direful calamities hung over them. For several years Heaven
denied them rain; the earth refused them food; the air, infected with
mortal contagion, filled the graves with dead; a great part of the
nation perished of famine or sickness; the last king was among the
number, and in the year 1052 the monarchy ended. The wretched remains
of the nation took refuge, some in Yucatan and others in Guatimala,
while some lingered around the graves of their kindred in the great
vale where Mexico was afterward founded. For a century the land of
Anahuac lay waste and depopulated. The Chechemecas, following in the
track of their ruined cities, reoccupied it, and after them the
Acolhuans, the Tlastaltecs, and the Aztecs, which last were the
subjects of Montezuma at the time of the invasion by the Spaniards. The
history of all these tribes or nations is misty, confused, and
indistinct. The Toltecans, represented to have been the most ancient,
are said to have been also the most polished. Probably they were the
originators of that peculiar style of architecture found in Guatimala
and Yucatan, which was adopted by all the subsequent inhabitants; and
as, according to their own annals, they did not set out on their
emigration to those countries from the vale of Mexico until the year
1052 of our era, the oldest cities erected by them in those countries
could have been in existence but from four to five hundred years at the
time of the Spanish conquest. This gives them a very modern date
compared with the Pyramids and temples of Egypt, and the other ruined
monuments of the Old World; it gives them a much less antiquity than
that claimed by the Maya manuscript, and, in fact, much less than I
should ascribe to them myself. In identifying them as the works of the
ancestors of the present Indians, the cloud which hung over their
origin is not removed; the time when and the circumstances under which
they were built, the rise, progress, and full development of the power,
art, and skill required for their