Bright days in sunny lands . e of Jerusalem to the ancientIsraelites, the spot for all members of all the tribesof Anahuac to gather together as occasion was a holier city than Tenochtitlan. Unfortunately,whether Quetzalcoatl taught human sacrifices or not(and some believe he did not), his temple was stainedby his followers with human blood, and every yearthousands of victims, captives from other tribes per-haps, were there offered up to appease the vengeanceof the god. What scenes transpired on this hill dur-ing the centuries preceding the Conquest no man canguess at, nor languag
Bright days in sunny lands . e of Jerusalem to the ancientIsraelites, the spot for all members of all the tribesof Anahuac to gather together as occasion was a holier city than Tenochtitlan. Unfortunately,whether Quetzalcoatl taught human sacrifices or not(and some believe he did not), his temple was stainedby his followers with human blood, and every yearthousands of victims, captives from other tribes per-haps, were there offered up to appease the vengeanceof the god. What scenes transpired on this hill dur-ing the centuries preceding the Conquest no man canguess at, nor language begin to portray. Undy-ing fires, strange ofiferings to The Fair God andto other gods, curious apparels, an abundance of gold,silver and jewels: there is nothing in human annalsfrom the time of the earliest Egyptian priests to thelatest of Buddhist worshipers that could have beenmore singular or more thoroughly pagan. Yet in theperformances on this man-made mound during theOlmec (or Toltec) and Aztec periods of history, in. TO PUEBLA AND THE SEA 411 years ranging, perhaps, from the Seventh to the earlypart of the Sixteenth Century, there were real gropingsafter the light of heaven. , The perfidy of the Cholulans, the punishment of itby Cortez, his destruction of the temple and the re-building on its site of one dedicated to the Christianreligion, are all matters well-known in history, andmake as interesting a chapter as any in all that con-cerns the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. To-day onthis great mound a church, erected later than the daysof Cortez, to supplant the smaller one he constructed,is visible from everywhere over the plain. At its footstands the present City of Cholula, having but fivethousand inhabitants. To the mound I went first, andwith intense interest. I desired to stand on that ven-erable pile, and from it to have the same view of Popo-catepetl and Ixtaccihuatl that the Conqueror had inhis day, and that Quetzalcoatl had, long, long years be-fore. The winding
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectvoyagesandtravels
