Part 7 (1/2)

The great peculiarity of the lake of Tezcuco is that it is a salt lake, containing much salt and carbonate of soda. The water is quite brackish and undrinkable. How it has come to be so is plain enough. The streams from the surrounding mountains bring down salt and soda in solution, derived from the decomposed porphyry; and as the water of the lake is not drained off into the sea, but evaporates, the solid const.i.tuents are left to acc.u.mulate in the lake.

In England, I think, we have no example of this; but the Dead Sea, the Caspian, the Great Salt Lake of Utah, and even the Mediterranean, have various salts acc.u.mulated in solution in the same way. It seems to me, that, by taking into account the proportion of soluble material contained in the water that flows down from the mountains, the probable quant.i.ty of water that flows down in the year, and the proportion of salt in the lake itself, some vague guess might be made as to the time this state of things has been lasting. I have no data, unfortunately, even for such a rough calculation as this, or I should like to try it.

In spite of the splendid climate, a great portion of the Valley of Mexico is anything but fertile; for the soil is impregnated with salt and soda, which in many places are so abundant as to form, when the water evaporates, a white efflorescence on the ground, which is called _tequesquite_, and regularly collected by the Indians. Some of it is stopped on its way down from the higher ground, by the evaporation of the water that was carrying it; and some is left by the lake itself, in its frequent floodings of the ground in its neighbourhood. So small is the difference of level between the lake and the plain that surrounds it, that the slightest rise in the height of the water makes an immense difference in the size of the lake; and even a strong wind will drive the water over great tracts of ground, from which it retires when the gale ceases. It must have been this, or something similar, that set Cortes upon writing home to Spain that the lakes were like inland seas, and even had tides like the ocean. Of course, this impregnation with salts is ruinous to the soil, which will produce nothing in such places but tufts of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s; and the sh.o.r.es of the lake are the most dismal districts one can imagine. All the lakes, however, are not so salt as Tezcuco; Chalco, for instance, is a fresh-water lake, and there the fertility of the sh.o.r.es is very great, as I have already had occasion to notice.

As soon as the novelty of this kind of travelling had worn off, we began to find it dull, and retired under our awning to breakfast and bitter beer; which latter luxury, thanks to a suitable climate and an English brewer, is very well understood in Mexico, and is even accepted as a great inst.i.tution by the Mexicans themselves.

We were just getting into a drowsy state, when an unusual bustle among the crew brought us out of our den, and we found that three hours of a.s.siduous poling had taken us half-way across the lake, just six miles--a good test of the value of the Aztec system of navigation. Here was a wooden cross set up in the water; and here, from time out of mind, the boatmen have been used to sing a little hymn to the Madonna, by whose favour we had got so far, and hoped to get safe to the end of our voyage. Very well they sang it too, and the scene was as striking as it was unexpected to us. It seemed to us, however, to be making a great matter of crossing a piece of water only a few feet deep; but Mr.

Millard a.s.sured us, that when a sudden gale came on, it was a particularly unpleasant place to be afloat in a Mexican canoe, which, being flat-bottomed, has no hold at all on the water, and from its shape is quite unmanageable in a wind. He himself was once caught in this way, and kept out all night, with a ”heavy sea” on the lake, the boat drifting helplessly, and threatening to overturn every moment, and that in places where the water was quite deep enough to drown them all.

The Indians lost their heads entirely, and throwing down their poles fell on their knees, and joined in the chorus with the women and children and the rest of the helpless brown people, beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and presenting medals and prints of our Lady of Guadalupe to each wave as it dashed into them. The wind dropped, however, and Mr.

Millard got safe to Tezcuco next morning; but, instead of receiving sympathy for his misfortunes when he got there, found that the idea of a tempest on the lake was reckoned a mere joke, and that the drawing-room of the Casa Grande had been decorated with a fancy portrait of himself, hanging to the half-way cross, with his legs in the water, and underneath, a poetical description of his sufferings to the tune of ”_Malbrouke s'en va-t-en guerre, ne sais quand reviendra_.”

More poling across the lake, and then another little ca.n.a.l, also constructed since the diminis.h.i.+ng of the water of the lake (which once came close to the city), and along which our Indians towed us. Then came a short ride, which brought us to the Casa Grande, where Mrs.

Bowring received us with overflowing hospitality. We went off presently into the town, to see the gla.s.sworks. In a country where all things imported have to be carried in rough waggons, or on mules' backs, and over bad roads, it would be hard if it did not pay to make gla.s.s; and, accordingly, we found the works in full operation. The soda is produced at Mr. Bowling's works close by, the fuel is charcoal from the mountains, and for sand they have a subst.i.tute, which I never heard of or saw anywhere else. It seems that a short distance from Tezcuco there is a deposit of hydrated silica, which is brought down in great blocks by the Indians; and this, when calcined, answers the purpose perfectly, as there is scarcely any iron in it. In its natural state it resembles beeswax in colour.

It is worth while to describe the Casa Grande, which is strikingly different from our European notions of the ”great house” of the village. As we enter by the gate, we find ourselves in a patio--an open quadrangle surrounded by a covered walk--a cloister in fact, into which open the rooms inhabited by the family. The second quadrangle, which opens into the first, is devoted to stables, kitchen, &c. The outer wall which surrounds the whole is very thick, and the entire building is built of mud bricks baked in the sun, and has no upper storey at all. It is a Pompeian house on a large scale, and suits the climate perfectly. The Aztec palaces we read so much of were built in just the same way. The roofs slope inwards from the sides of the quadrangle, and drain into the open s.p.a.ce in the middle. One afternoon, a tremendous tropical rain-storm showed us how necessary it was to have the covered walk round the quadrangle raised considerably above this open square in the middle, which a few minutes of such rain converted into a pond.

As for ourselves, we spent many very pleasant days at the Casa Grande, and thoroughly approved of the arrangement of the house, except that the four corners of the patio were provokingly alike, and the doors of the rooms also, so that we were as much bothered as the captain of the forty thieves to find our own doors, or any door except Mr. Millard's, whose name was indicated--with more regard to p.r.o.nunciation than spelling--with a 1 and nine 0's chalked on it.

In spite of a late evening spent in very pleasant society, we were up early next morning, ready for an excursion to the Pyramids of Teotihuacan, some sixteen miles off, or so, under the guidance of one of Mr. Bowring's men. The road lies through the plain, between great plantations of magueys, for this is the most renowned district in the Republic for the size of its aloes, and the quality of the pulque that is made from them. We stopped sometimes to examine a particularly large specimen, which might measure 30 feet round, and to see the juice, which had collected in the night, drawn out of the great hollow that had been cut to receive it, in the heart of the plant. The Indians have a great fancy for making crosses, and the aloe lends itself particularly to this kind of decoration. They have only to cut off six or eight inches of one leaf, and impale the piece on the sharp point of another, and the cross is made. Every good-sized aloe has two or three of these primitive religious emblems upon it.

Several little torrent-beds crossed the road, and over them were thrown old-fas.h.i.+oned Spanish stone bridges, as steep as the Rialto, or the bridge on the willow-patterned plates.

Before going to see the pyramids, we visited the caves in the hill-side not far from them, whence the stone was brought to build them. It is _tetzontli_, the porous amygdaloid which abounds among the porphyritic hills, a beautiful building-stone, easily worked, and durable. There was a large s.p.a.ce that seemed to have been quarried out bodily, and into this opened numerous caves. We left our horses at the entrance, and spent an hour or two in hunting the place over. The ground was covered with pieces of obsidian knives and arrow-heads, and fragments of what seemed to have been larger tools or weapons; and we found numbers of hammer-heads, large and small, mostly made of greenstone, some whole, but most broken.

We find two sorts of stone hammers in Europe. Solid hammers belong to the earliest period. They are made of longish rolled pebbles; some are shaped a little artificially, and are grooved round to hold the handle, which was a flexible twig bent double and with the two ends tied together, so as to keep the stone head in its place. The hammers of a later period of the ”stone age” are shaped more like the iron ones our smiths use at the present day, and they have a hole bored in the middle for the handle. In Brittany, where Celtic remains are found in such abundance, it is not uncommon to see stone hammers of the latter kind hanging up in the cottages of the peasants, who use them to drive in nails with. They have an odd way of providing them with handles, by sticking them tight upon branches of young trees, and when the branch has grown larger, and has thus rivetted itself tightly on both sides of the stone head, they cut it off, and carry home the hammer ready for use.

Though the Mexicans carried the arts of knife and arrow-making and sculpturing hard stone to such perfection, I do not think they ever discovered the art of making a hole in a stone hammer. The handles of the axes shown in the picture-writings are clumsy sticks swelling into a large k.n.o.b at one end, and the axe-blade is fixed into a hole in this k.n.o.b. Some of the Mexican hammers seem to have had their handles fixed in this way; while others were made with a groove, in the same manner as the earlier kind of European stone hammers just described.

When we consider the beauty of the Mexican stonecutter's work, it seems wonderful that they should have been able to do it without iron tools.

It is quite clear that, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, they used bronze hatchets, containing that very small proportion of tin which gives the alloy nearly the hardness of steel. We saw many of these hatchets in museums, and Mr. Christy bought some good specimens in a collection of antiquities which had belonged to an old Mexican, who got them princ.i.p.ally from the suburb of Tlatelolco, in the neighbourhood of the ancient market-place of the city. Such axes were certainly common among the ancient Mexicans. One of the items of the hieroglyphic tribute-roll in the Mendoza Codex is eighty bronze hatchets.

A story told by Bernal Diaz is to the point. He says that he and his companions, noticing that the Indians of the coast generally carried bright metal axes, the material of which looked like gold of a low quality, got as many as six hundred such axes from them in the course of three days' bartering, giving them coloured gla.s.s-beads in exchange.

Both sides were highly satisfied with their bargain; but it all came to nothing, as the chronicler relates with considerable disgust, for the gold turned out to be copper, and the beads were found to be trash when the Indians began to understand them better. Such hard copper axes as these have been found at Mitla, in the State of Oajaca, where the ruined temples seem to form a connecting link between the monuments of Teotihuacan and Xochicalco and the ruined cities of Yucatan and Chiapas.

We want one more link in the chain to show the use of the same kind of tools from Mexico down to Yucatan, and this link we can supply. In Lord Kingsborough's great work on Mexican Antiquities there is one picture-writing, the Dresden Codex, which is not of Aztec origin at all. Its hieroglyphics are those of Palenque and Uxmal; and in this ma.n.u.script we have drawings of hatchets like those of Mexico, and fixed in the same kind of handles, but of much neater workmans.h.i.+p.

But here we come upon a difficulty. It is supposed that the pyramids of Teotihuacan, as well as most of the great architectural works of the country, were the work of the Toltec race, who quitted this part of the country several centuries before the Spanish Conquest. It seems incredible that bronze should have been in use in the country for so long a time, and not have superseded so bad a material as stone for knives and weapons. We have good evidence to show that in Europe the introduction of bronze was almost simultaneous with the complete disuse of stone for such purposes. It is true that Herodotus describes the embalmers, in his time, as cutting open the bodies with ”an Ethiopic stone” though they were familiar with the use of metal. Indeed the flint knives which he probably meant may be seen in museums. But this peculiar usage was most likely kept up for some mystical reason, and does not affect the general question. Almost as soon as the Spaniards brought iron to Mexico, it superseded the old material. The ”bronze age” ceased within a year or two, and that of iron began.

The Mexicans called copper or bronze ”tepuztli,” a word of rather uncertain etymology. Judging from the a.n.a.logous words in languages allied to the Aztec, it seems not unlikely that it meant originally _hatchet_ or _breaker_, just as ”itztli,” or obsidian, appears to have meant originally _knife_.[12]

When the Mexicans saw iron in the hands of the Spaniards, they called it also ”tepuztli,” which thus became a general word for metal; and then they had to distinguish iron from copper, as they do at the present day, by calling them ”_tliltic_ tepuztli,” and ”_chichiltic_ tepuztli;” that is, ”black metal,” and ”red metal.”

When the subject of the use of bronze in stone-cutting is discussed, as it so often is with special reference to Egypt, one may doubt whether people have not underrated its capabilities, when the proportion of tin is accurately adjusted to give the maximum hardness; and especially when a minute portion of iron enters into its composition. Sir Gardner Wilkinson relates that he tried the edge of one of the Egyptian mason's chisels upon the very stone it had evidently been once used to cut, and found that its edge was turned directly; and therefore he wonders that such a tool could have been used for the purpose, of course supposing that the tool as he found it was just as the mason left it. This, however, is not quite certain. If we bury a bra.s.s tool in a damp place for a few weeks, it will be found to have undergone a curious molecular change, and to have become quite soft and weak, or, as the workmen call it, dead. We ought to be quite sure whether lying for centimes under ground may not have made some similar change in bronze.

I have seen many p.r.i.c.kly pears in different places, but never such specimens as those that were growing among the stones in this old quarry. They had gnarled and knotted trunks of hard wood, and were as big as pollard-oaks; their age must have been immense; but, unfortunately, one could not measure it, or it would have been a good criterion of the age of the quarry, which had not only been excavated but abandoned before their time. In one of the caves was a human skeleton, blanched white and clean, and near it some one has stuck a cross, made of two bits of stick, in the crevices of a heap of stones.

Returning to the entrance of the quarry, well loaded with stone hammers and knives, we sat down to breakfast, in a cave, where our man had established himself with the horses. An attempt on my part to cut German sausage with an obsidian knife proved a decided failure.

We had already been struck by the appearance of the two pyramids of Teotihuacan, when we pa.s.sed by Otumba on our way to Mexico. The hills which skirt the plain are so near them as to diminish their apparent size; but even at a distance they are conspicuous objects. Now, when we came close to them, and began by climbing to their summits, and walking round their terraces, to measure ourselves against them, we began gradually to realize their vast bulk; and this feeling continually grew upon us. Modern architecture strives to unite the greatest possible effect with the least cost; and the modern churches of southern Europe and Spanish America, with their fine tall facades fronting the street, and insignificant little buildings behind, show this idea in its fullest development. Pyramids are built with no such object, and make but little show in proportion to their vast ma.s.s of material; but then one gets from them a sense of solid magnitude that no other building gives, however vast its proportions may be. Neither of us had ever seen the Egyptian pyramids. Even in Mexico these of Teotihuacan are not the largest; for, though the pyramid of Cholula is no higher, it covers far more ground. Were these monuments in Egypt, they would only rank, from their size, in the second cla.s.s.