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162 it been forced to pay tribute to its proud neighbors around Lake Tezcuco, although it had been completely hemmed in by them, so that Tlascala had become a little world by itself, without a single gate through which it dared to procure the products of the Mexican valley.

Cortez, who had ventured into the interior with but a handful of his own men, could not leave such a nest of warriors between him and his base of supplies on the coast. On the other hand, they might be made allies in case of war with the Aztecs. A visit to Tlascala was therefore resolved upon.

In the march to Tlascala the army came to a high battlemented wall twenty feet thick, nine feet high and six miles long, which, reaching from one mountain to another, defended one of the approaches to that country. This frontier wall was semicircular in one place and overlapped itself, making an indirect and easily-defended entrance. The stones of which this fortification was formed were so firmly cemented together that years afterward, when the Spaniards wished to level it to the ground—as they did everything that could keep alive a spark of national pride among the natives—it was found almost impossible to pry them asunder; so that the remains of these celebrated walls are to be seen to-day.

When the Spanish army marched to Tlascala, in August, 1519, this wall had not a single defender. A little way farther on the other side some Indians showed themselves, and fled without any notice of the signals of peace which Cortez caused to be made. As it afterward proved, these were scouts of a force of a thousand men, who came with loud cries of defiance and brandishing their weapons. They soon fled, and the Spaniards followed, supposing that these, like the other Indians, were