Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/431

Rh of timber, in the form of an amphitheater, which they were erecting for a "plaza de toros" where thousands of people doubtless nocked from all the surrounding country, about New Years, to indulge in and gloat over the brutalities of the bull-fight.

Entering carriages, sent for us by the Governor of Tlaxcala, to ride some three or four miles down to the ancient city, we met, a little distance down the road, a train of pack-Indians, coming in from the mountains with lumber, with which to complete the amphitheater. Each Indian carried on his back, suspended from his head by a leathern strap across his forehead, a pitch-pine beam, twenty feet long, ten inches wide, and six inches thick. The weight of each of these beams, according to the lowest estimate made by members of our party, was four hundred pounds—I think it more probable that they would weigh five hundred pounds—and the load for a mule is only three hundred pounds; yet these sturdy fellows earned them off at a dog-trot, talking good-naturedly as they went, and had probably brought them fifteen or twenty miles that day. Could our gymnasts do this?

Half an hour's ride over a dusty and heavy road, all out of repair, brought us to the ancient city, which, in its prime, occupied the heights on both sides of a narrow valley for many miles; at least, so Cortez said. There were four great chiefs of the Republic of Tlaxcala, and each dwelt in a grand palace on these heights. The Spaniards built churches on the site of each; and we have now only the ruinous old churches, and the doubtful statements of fishy, old historians, in evidence of their once having existed. The old town along the heights at the base of the Cerro Blanco, or