Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/347

 the destruction of the stronghold of their hated enemies; for they were among the first of the Indians to ally themselves with the conquistadores after Cortés had established himself in Tezcoco and sat down to the investment of the capital city.

The best fishing on the lakes is near the town of Ayotla (reached over the Morelos Railroad), where the poor people subsist almost entirely upon the products of the water and marshes. It is an inherited taste, this depraved one of the present Aztecs,—a relic of those times when they wandered as vagrants on the lake margins, when they ate frogs, tadpoles, salamanders, the pith of the bulrush, and a thousand things unheard of among us. There is no more peculiar product of the Mexican lakes than that marsh fly called axayacatl (Ahuatlea Mexicana), which deposits its eggs in incredible quantities upon flags and rushes, and which are eagerly sought out and made into cakes which are sold in the markets. Says that festive monk, Thomas Gage, who visited Mexico in 1625, "The Indians gathered much of this and kept it in Heaps, and made thereof Cakes, like unto Brickbats, . . . . and they did eat this Meal with as good a Stomach as we eat Cheese; yea, and they hold opinion that this Scum or fatness of the water is the cause that such great number of Fowl cometh to the Lake, which in the winter season is infinite."

These cakes "like unto brickbats" are sold in the markets to this day, and the black heaps of the ahauhtli, or "water-wheat," may be frequently seen dotting the mud flats about the lakes, Tezcoco especially. The insects themselves (which are about the size of a house-fly) are pounded into a paste,—as they are collected in myriads,—boiled in corn husks, and thus sold. The eggs, resembling fine fish roe, are compressed into a paste, mixed with eggs of fowls, and form a staple article of food particularly called for during Lent.

The Indians of the Mexican lakes have a systematic method, by which they plant bundles of reeds a few feet apart, with their tops sticking out of the water. The insects deposit their eggs upon these reeds in such quantities that they not only cover them, but depend in clusters. When completely covered,