Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/347

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About eighteen miles south of Cuernavaca, in the State of Mexico, there is a cerro or hill, known as Xochicalco or the "hill of flowers," whose summit is occupied by the remains of an ancient stone pyramid. The traveller reaches this eminence after travelling over a wide plain intersected by deep barrancas, and almost entirely denuded of trees and shrubbery. The base of this hill is surrounded by the remains of a deep wide ditch, and its top is attained by five spiral terraces, supported by walls of stone joined with cement. At suitable distances from each other, along the edge of this winding path are the remains of bulwarks fashioned like the bastions of a fortification. On the summit there is a wide extensive level, the eastern part of which is occupied by three truncated cones, resembling the smaller mounds found among the pyramids of Teotihuacan. On the other three sides of the esplenade there are other masses of stones, which may have also been portions of similar tumuli. The stones of which these lesser mounds were constructed have evidently been nicely shaped and covered with a coat of stucco.

Passing upward, amid tangled trees and vines, along the last terrace, and through the cornfield which is cultivated on the plain at top by an Indian ranchero, the traveller at length stands before the remains of the elegant structure that once crowned the summit with its carved and massive architecture. The reports of engineers who visited this pyramid in years long past, and the legends of the neighborhood, declared that it originally consisted of five stories, placed upon each other at regular intervals and separated by narrow platforms. But of all these, nothing now remains except portions of the first body, which is formed of cut porphyry and covered with the singular emblems which are accurately represented in the annexed plate of the north-western angle.

Amid the neglect of the viceroyal government, and the revolutionary disturbances subsequent to the rebellion against Spain, this beautiful monument of ancient art, seems to have been entirely forgotten, save by the neighboring haciendados or planters, who used it as a quarry, from which they might supply the wants of their estates without the trouble or expense of a stone cutter. In the middle of the eighteenth century the fine terraces were yet perfect. But, as the country became settled in the neighborhood, the farmers began to pilfer from the mass, and, not long before we visited it in 1842, an adjacent land owner had carried off large loads of the sculptured stones to build a dam in a neighboring ravine, for the use of his cattle.