Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/63

 These masses of stone are not only interesting on account of their connection with the Mexican Mythology, but they are beautiful specimens of Azteck art. The carving with which they are covered is executed with a neatness and gracefulness that would make them, as mere ornaments, worthy of the chisel of an ancient sculptor.

The present town of Cholula is scarcely more than a village, and seems gradually still more decaying. At the conquest it was a city of much splendor, as we gather from the accounts of Cortez, who, in his letters to the Emperor speaks of it thus:

"This city of Churultecal is situated on a plain, and contains twenty thousand houses within the body of the town, and as many in the suburb. Its people are well dressed, and its neighboring fields are exceedingly fertile; and I certify to your majesty, that, from one of the temples I have counted more than four hundred towers, and they are all the towers of temples!"

Such was Cholula when it fell under the Spanish sway, and there seems to be no reason to doubt, that, "sacred city" as it was held to be by the Indians of the period, the account of Cortez was indeed correct. But the temple is year after year crumbling, more and more, to decay; its outlines are becoming more and more indistinct; and of the race that worshipped on that pyramid, there now remains nothing but a few servile Indians who till the adjacent fields, and the women who throng the market-place with their fruits and flowers. I wanted some relics of the spot, and commissioning a proud-looking fellow, who may have been, for aught I know, a great great-great-great-grandson of some of the lords of Cholula, to hunt up a few antiquities; he brought me, after an hour's search among the ruins a quantity of pottery, heads of animals, fragments of vases, and a small idol sculptured in white marble. These are my souvenirs of Cholula.