Page:Romance of History, Mexico.djvu/295

 for ever disappeared; seven-eighths of the city lay in ruins, and Cortés, as he stood on the teocalli, was planning its utter destruction.

"There was in the army," says Bernal Diaz, "a soldier who boasted of having served in Italy and of the great battles he had seen there. This man was eternally talking of the wonderful military machines which he knew the art of constructing, and how he could make a stone engine which should in two days destroy the whole quarter of the city where Guatemozin had retreated. He told Cortés so many fine things of this kind that he persuaded him into a trial of his experiments." The machine, which took several days to make, was built on a great platform in the centre of the market-place. Here, in the happy, prosperous days of Tenochtitlan, jugglers and mountebanks had charmed the populace with many an ingenious trick. In the machine was placed a huge rock, and the Aztecs on the house-tops hard by watched with terror while the engineer set in train his death-dealing creation. The rock, according to the proud inventor, would be hurled with terrific force upon a neighbouring palace. "But, behold! instead of taking that direction, the stone flew up vertically into the air," and then crashed down again upon the catapult and smashed it into pieces. Cortés was ashamed and much enraged, but it continued, says Diaz, the joke of the army for many a day.

More and more horrible grew the sufferings of the besieged, but still they declared that never would they submit, and they yet had spirit to fight and taunt the Spaniards. 255