Bright days in sunny lands . uest (1519) that the accounts of it might not havebeen transmitted with correctness to the is said that seventy thousand victims perished dur-ing the days given up to the dedicatory services. Im-possible as this seems (and it is more probable that thisnumber refers to the sacrifices through the whole em-pire, where were hundreds of similar but smaller tem-ples), it is not a romance that these human sacrificesoccurred. Bernardo Diaz says he counted one hun-dred and thirty-six thousand skulls at one teocalli!Spaniards themselves saw the bloody rites whe
Bright days in sunny lands . uest (1519) that the accounts of it might not havebeen transmitted with correctness to the is said that seventy thousand victims perished dur-ing the days given up to the dedicatory services. Im-possible as this seems (and it is more probable that thisnumber refers to the sacrifices through the whole em-pire, where were hundreds of similar but smaller tem-ples), it is not a romance that these human sacrificesoccurred. Bernardo Diaz says he counted one hun-dred and thirty-six thousand skulls at one teocalli!Spaniards themselves saw the bloody rites when un-able to prevent them. Spaniards even saw their fellows,captured in combat after Cortez first evacuated thecapital, immolated on this central sacrificial summitin Tenochtitlan. Cortez and his men were at the timeon heights outside the city, after one of the most disas-trous days of his second campaign against the the early morning he saw his brave comrades, whohad been captured, taken to the top of the Great Tec-. :<i. TBNOCHTITLAN, OLD AND NEW 365 calli, stripped to the waist, laid upon the sacrificialstone by Aztec warriors, and their hot, reeking heartstorn out of their bodies and deposited in the censer be-fore the idol that crowned the summit. The heartswere for the cruel god Huitzilopochtli; the bodies wereflung down to the base of the temple and given up toa cannibal repast! The spot was the most sacred oneof the nation of Montezuma, and thereafter the mostdetested to the Spaniards. Who shall wonder, or ob-ject, that the latter razed it to its foundations, over-turning Idol and stone, earth and cement, to its utter-most fragment, and in its place reared a Cathedral tothe glory of God! The same Idol which was on thesummit, the same Sacrificial Stone, perhaps, may nowbe seen in the National Museum, but not one stone ofthe Teocalli itself remains in the position it was sometimes stand on the Plaza, or in similar po-sitions in other Mexican cities,
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectvoyagesandtravels
