Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/232

224 660 feet, in length. The Hispano-Moriscan style of architecture is the same throughout the country, and gives to every city and town a resemblance to every other, with wide paved streets crossing each other at right angles and terminating in a great square in the centre. The houses, massively built, of stone, are also all after the same pattern. From the street, through a great doorway, closed at night by a barred and bolted door studded with nails, you enter the patio, or lower court, flagged with stone and surrounded by the stables and servants' quarters. This door is rarely wide open for free ingress and. egress, but is loosely chained, and strictly guarded by the portero, who occupies a little room on the ground floor. This court is open to the sky, and above it are usually two ranges of living and sleeping rooms, with corridors in front, ornamented with tasteful iron balustrades, gay with flowers and vines, and sometimes cooled by the waters of a plashing fountain. Except in a house occupying a corner lot, only one wall opens upon the street, and the windows of this are well guarded with iron bars, and closely curtained; so from the outside world the families are as strictly secluded as the inmates of a prison or convent. Air, light, and sunshine they obtain from above the court, and pass their days among themselves in négligé and careless freedom. Above the apartments just mentioned is the roof-top,—the azotea,—terraced, like the roof-tops of the Orient. Here the family gather at evening time to enjoy the cool breezes, the quiet, and the gleaming stars of night.

Seated upon the azotea, with cool breezes playing about you, the hum of busy life in the plaza and streets coming up from below, and with soft moonlight flooding the sea of roofs on every side,—this is the time and place to bring up again the spectres of the dead and departed conquistadores.

We left the Spaniards at Tlascala on their way to the city of their aspirations; thence they marched upon Cholula, whence, after committing a massacre of its inhabitants, they climbed the mountains that alone separated them from the valley of Mexico, over a trail that yet exists, between the volcanoes of Popocatapetl