Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/268

230 to it as a work of art, forms one of the most picturesque features of the landscape. At a short distance it presents the appearance of a natural mound, covered with a luxuriant growth of trees and shrubbery, and is surmounted by a simple chapel, whose belfry towers some eighty feet above the pyramid. A road winds round the pyramid from base to summit, up which we passed on horseback. This road is cut into the pyramid, in some places, six or eight feet, and here one sees the first evidence of the artificial construction of the latter. It is built of adobes, or sun-dried brick, interspersed with small fragments of stone—porphyry and limestone. Its dimensions, as stated by Humboldt, are: base 1,060, elevation 162 feet; but its altitude is much greater. On the day of our visit. Lieutenant Semmes, of the navy, who had provided himself with a pocket sextant and tape-line for the purpose, determined its altitude to be 205 feet. As this measurement diflfered so widely from that of Humboldt, Lieut. S. requested Lieut. Beauregard, of the engineers, who visited the pyramid a few days afterwards, to test his observations; which Lieut. B., using a longer base, did, making the altitude 203 feet. These two observations, from different points, with different bases, and both with the sextant, show conclusively that Humboldt, who used a barometer, is in error. The mean of the two is 204 feet, which we may henceforth regard as the true height of this extraordinary monument—being nearly half as great as that of the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. The pyramid of Cholula is quadrangular in form, and truncated—the area of the apex being 165 feet square. On this area formerly stood a heathen temple, now supplanted by the Gothic church of our Lady of Remedios. The temple on this pyramid was, in the days of Cortéz, a sort of Mecca, to which all the surrounding tribes, far and near, made an annual pilgrimage, held a fair, and attended the horrible human sacrifices peculiar to their superstition. Besides this great temple, there were, as we learn from the letters of Cortéz to Charles V., and also from the simple diary of his doughty old Captain, Bernal Diaz, some 400 others in the city, built around the base of the larger. The city itself contained 40,000 householders, and the whole plain was studded with populous villages. The plain is now comparatively a desert, and two or three thousand miserable leperos build their mud huts and practice their thievish propensities upon the site of the holy city.