Page:The Conquest of Mexico Volume 1.djvu/276

 Romans, "in phrases of honeyed eloquence far beyond anything I can repeat," says the brave and simple-hearted chronicler who heard them. Cortés was, indeed, master of that eloquence which went to the soldiers' hearts. For their sympathies were his, and he shared in that romantic spirit of adventure which belonged to them. "We are ready to obey you," they cried as with one voice. "Our fortunes, for better or worse, are cast with yours." Taking leave, therefore, of their hospitable Indian friends, the little army, buoyant with high hopes and lofty plans of conquest, set forward on the march to Mexico.

It was August 16, 1519. During the first day their road lay through the tierra caliente, the beautiful land where they had been so long lingering; the land of the vanilla, cochineal, cacao (not till later days of the orange, and the sugar-cane), products which, indigenous to Mexico, have now become the luxuries of Europe; the land where the fruits and the flowers chase one another in unbroken circle through the year; where the gales are loaded with perfumes till the sense aches at their sweetness; and the groves are filled with many-coloured birds, and insects whose enamelled wings glisten like diamonds in the bright sun of the Tropics. Such are the magical splendours of this paradise of the senses. Yet nature, who generally works in a spirit of compensation, has provided one here; since the same burning sun which quickens into life these glories of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, calls forth the pestilent malaria, with its train of bilious disorders, unknown to the cold skies of the North. The season in  which the Spaniards were there, the rainy months of summer, was precisely that in which the vomito rages with greatest fury; when the European stranger hardly ventures to set his foot on shore, still less to linger there a day. We find no mention made of it in the records of the Conquerors, nor any notice, indeed, of an uncommon mortality. The fact doubtless corroborates the theory of those who postpone the appearance of the yellow fever till long after the occupation of the country by the whites. It proves, at