Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/38

32 all that they knew of civilization to those who preceded them.

The Toltecs filled the land with colossal masonry. Many of the temples, pyramids, castles and aqueducts which were in decay when Cortez arrived, in 1519, are supposed to have been built by these people. The half-buried ruins of Tula, or Tullan, one of their great cities, may still have been inhabited at the time of the conquest, but most of the places known to have been built by them were numbered among the antiquities of Mexico when Columbus was near that land, more than twenty years before.

In Xochimilco is found a great pyramid with five terraces, built on a platform of solid rock. This rock has been hollowed out, and long galleries with smooth glistening sides formed within it. The great pyramid of Cholula, built by the early race, covered forty-five acres of ground and was fourteen hundred feet square at the base. A winding road led to its top, which was flat, with small towers for worship. All these structures were built with their sides squared by the points of the compass. They are now found buried in the depths of vast forests, far away from the haunts of civilized men. As the Indians always seem unwilling to reveal the secret of their existence, many of these are no doubt yet unknown to the white race.

The temple of Papantla, fifty miles from Vera Cruz, was hidden in the dense woods west of that city for more than two hundred years after the Spaniards landed on the coast, having been discovered by a party of hunters in 1790. This building is so old that those who could decipher the picture-language of the Aztecs could not interpret the inscriptions on its terraced sides, though