Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/276

262 is great and important to an Indian people will appear to a European, as soon as the first impression of strangeness has worn off, often very insignificant. All the descriptions of the high civilization and the magnitude ascribed to Cholula rest upon the testimony of Spanish eye-witnesses, and have been composed without due regard to the sort of comparisons the Spaniards were able at that time to make. When, for example, Cortés compared Tlascala with Granada and Cempohual with Seville, we should not only consider how large those cities were in the year 1519, but should especially recollect that the comparisons only related to superficial extent. Every Indian town contains much more vacant space than any European city of the same area. All these accounts are therefore nearly as inexact as the political "campaign documents" of the present. Without really intending to state what was false, the authors of them involuntarily exaggerated in favor of their predilections. Everything was misunderstood at first, or not understood at all; the character of the people and their manners and customs were novel and bewildering. The population of a place was always greatly overestimated, for wherever the Spaniards showed themselves the people ran together, and the same throngs accompanied them all around, so that they met at every step a multitude that gave the appearance of great traffic.

Cholula had in its original condition not many more than 25,000 inhabitants, who were divided among the six quarters that surrounded, at considerable intervals, the chief sacrificial hill. The hill rose out of the usual walled court and stood where