Page:The Story of Mexico.djvu/172

140 and capital of Mexico. The white-faced strangers had left the coast, and it was to be hoped they might never come back. The nobles took up their train of pleasure and the common people went on with their peaceable, happy lives, floating over the canals with their produce-laden, flower-heaped boats, singing low chants of the past in a melancholy, minor key, peculiar to the Mexican music.

But one day, in the end of March, 1519, swift messengers came up the steep ascent between the tropical flat shore and the cool plateau of Anahuac, and demanded instant audience with the king. Montezuma knew well what was coming. During, the interval since the departure of the white men, he had felt that it was only a respite, and that the terror of their presence was only a premonition of worse things to come. So he received the messengers with a calm smile, and simply said to them: "Speak." These messengers were wonderfully well informed. Without giving the precise details we now know, they could describe the conflict, the terror of the Tabascans, and above all the strange animals, unlike any thing they had seen before, which bore their riders into battle, perhaps, in fact, a part of the same machinery, turning, plunging, advancing as if by magic, and, as they thought, invulnerable to all weapons. Also the thunder and lightning of the new-comers was something supernatural, destructive flashes of fire under their control, accompanied by a bursting sound, and followed by instant death.

These tidings appeared incredible, yet must be believed, and, what was more, acted upon. The