Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/50

44 forests which have overgrown and buried so many others. In the dry air the brilliant red and black of its wonderful frescoes have never faded. Some gifted architect of a forgotten age has adorned both the inner and the outer walls of these buildings with panels of mosaic so exquisitely wrought that "they can only be matched by the monuments of Greece and Rome in their best days." The rooms have vaulted ceilings and are in pairs, unconnected with other apartments, opening out of doors. Some rude artist of a later day has scrawled coarse figures on these walls, showing that the nameless builders of Mitla, like the Aztecs and other tribes, had suffered from invasions. The terraced roofs of many of these buildings are now heaped by Nature's kindly hand with luxuriant vegetation, and we can see where the Aztecs learned to make their beautiful roof-gardens. Sculptures, paintings, tesselated pavements, luxurious baths, fountains and artificial lakes, are all found in mournful decay in the silent depths of many a wilderness.

The cell-like apartments of one of these elegant buildings in Mitla led its observer to suppose that it was a convent and to name it "The House of the Nuns," but in comparing it with other buildings in Northern Mexico, some of which are now inhabited by pueblo Indians, we find that this must have been one of those joint tenement-houses which Columbus noticed in Cuba, and which form one of the strongest proofs that society throughout Spanish America was communistic. They were generally large and calculated to hold a clan or a number of related families. Some were several stories high and had hundreds of rooms; in these a population of from one hundred to three thousand found shelter. In the country these fort-like villages were similar to those