Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/328

320 The grandest church-building on this continent is the cathedral, facing the Plaza. Its white towers, two hundred feet high, overtop every building in the city. Its mere shell cost two millions of dollars, and that, too, in a land and an age when labor was very cheap. Scarcely a church interior in the world can surpass this in rich and costly decoration. The wealth of "the golden realm of Mexico" was poured out here without stint. Heavy marbles carved by the best masters of Europe were brought over the sea and carried by surefooted mules over the dizzy heights of the sierras. The elaborately carved choir was made in Mexico, and is estimated to be worth a million of dollars. This edifice was begun in 1573, by order of Philip II., and finished in about a hundred years. It is of the Doric order, with three entrance-doors on the principal façade, flanked by two square open towers and crowned with a dome of fine proportions. At the base of one of these towers is the celebrated Aztec calendar, an enormous granite monolith, which was removed in 1790 from the place in the Plaza where it had been buried by the orders of Cortez.

The cathedral occupies the site of the great Aztec temple, and is five hundred feet long by four hundred and twenty wide. "The first object that presents itself to one entering it is the altar, erected on a platform in the centre of the building; it is made of highly-wrought and highly-polished silver and covered with a profusion of crosses and ornaments of pure gold. On each side of this altar runs a balustrade, enclosing a space about eight feet wide and eighty or a hundred feet long. The balusters are about four feet high and four inches thick in