Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/466

460 But little is known about the famous and ancient ruins bearing the poetical name of Xochicalco, or "Hill of Flowers." This ignorance is probably due to its isolated and rather inaccessible position. The cerro (hill) is three hundred feet in height, and its summit reached by five winding stone stairways.

Crowning the eminence is the Castillo, a building measuring sixty-four by fifty-eight feet. This structure is composed of great blocks of porphyry, held together without the aid of mortar, and covered over with strange and grotesque sculpturings of men, beasts and fishes.

The origin of this unique and wonderful structure is shrouded in mystery. Who were the builders, and for what purpose it was built, none can tell. As a writer remarks, "It has outlasted both history and memory."

When we consider that the immense blocks of stone were probably all brought from great distances and borne up the hill by what means the imagination cannot conceive of, we are struck with amazement at the magnitude of the undertaking and the patience of the builders. Entirely without mechanical appliances, how they accomplished the feat of transporting and placing those huge stones, fills us with a wonder only equaled by a contemplation of its sister enterprise, the pyramids of Egypt.

The pyramid of Papantla is built in six stories, and a great stairway of fifty-seven steps leads to the top, which is flat. Strange shapes of serpents and alligators are carved in relief over the sides.

As these "peculiar people" so frequently planned their structures with some mysterious regard to "the times and seasons" and to the heavenly bodies, it is thought by some that the three hundred and sixty-six niches in the walls of this temple bore some connection with the ancient Toltec calendar.

But to return to Cholula. The deity worshiped by the ancient Cholulans was more peaceful and less bloodthirsty than Huitzilopochtli, the terrible and warlike god of the Aztecs. He was known as "god of the air," Quetzalcoatl, and in his hands was intrusted everything relating to agriculture and the arts. So happy was his reign that it