Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/94

86 fierce attack and swept away the inhabitants as with a besom of destruction.

In these days of unbelief there are some who doubt the accounts given by both Spanish and native historians of human beings kept to fatten like cattle in a stall, of still-palpitating bodies thrown from the high altar down to the captor and his friends, who stood waiting to receive this horrible provision for a decorous feast to be eaten as sacred food at the command of the gods. But these writers, though differing from each other in many things, agree in their testimony concerning this. Cortez, who is apt to be more moderate in his statements than his followers, says of one of the Nahua tribes in his letters to the king, "These people eat human flesh—a fact so notorious that I have not taken the trouble to send Your Majesty any proof of it." During the siege of Mexico the Tlascalan allies of Cortez subsisted largely on the bodies of the slain, and Montezuma himself was reproved by his Spanish visitors for this horrible practice.

One of the descendants of Hungry Fox, the great Tezcucan chief, wrote in Spanish an interesting history of his people. In this he says that his great ancestor became disgusted with the sacrifices and cannibal feasts in which they engaged during their connection with the Aztecs, and that before their confederacy was broken up he made an effort to put a stop to all such practices and to return to the milder rites of their star-worshiping ancestors. But his voice was raised in vain; the old priests shook their matted locks and protested against his innovations. They pointed to Tenochtitlan, across the lake, as an instance of the glory and success to be won by the faithful votaries of the war-god. To give