Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/423

Rh leads up to the summit of the finest one, on which there is a cross. The fine old church of San Juan Tehuacan stands near the pyramids, and there are little villages and hamlets all around. There are several smaller pyramids in the plain, but they appear to have been only begun and never finished. It is said that the largest of the pyramids of Tehuacan was opened by orders of Maximilian, and found to contain abundant evidences of great antiquity and many Aztec relics, but nothing of much intrinsic value. Soon after passing the pyramids, we went through the great battle field of Otumba, where Cortez, with his regular Spanish soldiers, and Tlaxcalan allies fought, and, after the most desperate struggle, routed, one hundred thousand Mexicans. There is a current tradition, to the effect that Otumba owes its name to an exclamation of Cortez after the battle. As he looked at the piles of the dead on the field, and bitterly counted the thinned ranks of his army, he exclaimed:

"O tumba de mi soldados!" (O tomb of my soldiers!)

The story may be safely regarded as on a par, in point of reliability, with those which pretend to give the origin of the names of Ohio, Iowa, Alabama, etc. There are only adobe-walled hamlets, patches of corn, and wide fields of aloe plants, to-day, on the ground where the fate of Mexico was decided nearly three centuries and-a-half ago. Not even a monument marks the spot, and if there were no railway station there, the traveler would pass it without being aware that he was upon grandly historic ground.

At Ometusco, eighteen leagues from Mexico, we met the up-train bound for the capital, and took leave of the