Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/57

Rh asserts its sway; and, except to those most deeply imbued with the passion of the antiquary, it is the new, strange land, and the exquisite novelty of color and interest in which it is set, that command and hold attention afterward. Even here, with the remains of the old gods standing in the sunshine of the small plaza, and the relics of old barbarism in the dust of the Toltec pyramid beyond, one feels more as if he had stumbled upon a new discovery than on the evidence of an old fact. We gathered broken fragments of obsidian razor-blades and flint arrow-heads which had probably known, hundreds of years ago, the baptism of human blood; we saw, in the pavement of the venerable church, stones covered with hieroglyphics belonging to the idolatrous worship of the past. But across the sacrificial hill, flowers were springing, and birds singing in the bright air; on the carved floor before the altar a group of little children offered loving prayer to the Christian's God, and in the evidences of a simpler and purer faith, the gloom of those ancient mysteries was pushed into the background.

It was here on a hill by the railroad that we first saw the process of pulque-making going on in a