Page:The Story of Mexico.djvu/45

Rh nothing from the courts of Europe, whose forms and ceremonies, while as rigid and as grand, borrowed nothing from the traditions of the royal house of Spain.

Whence came this proud people which had conquered for itself a place in that valley of the perfect climate?

About fifty miles from the city of Mexico is a town named Tula, formerly Tollan, which means perhaps "the place of many people." A road, shaded by great ash-trees leads across the river Tula, through a narrow pass to some ruins of an ancient civilization, ruins already when the city of Montezuma, which Cortés found flourishing, arose. A building of ancient stone is still there, laid in mud and covered with hard cement of a ruddy tint, with which the floors are also covered. The largest room in the building is not more than fifteen feet square. Another building farther on, larger than the first, is called the Casa Grande; it contains about thirty small rooms, connected by stairways, as their height above the ground varies. The plaza of the little town Tula contains the portion of a column and the lower half of a colossal statue, which belong, as well as the buildings just described, to the period of the Toltecs, whose capital was the ancient Tollan. Their city was abandoned a hundred years before the Aztecs entered it, and its founders scattered. Whence came the shadowy race whose history vaguely underlies that of later Mexican races?

The great mound which since Humboldt's time has