Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/518

510 Virgen de los Remedios. This church is in excellent repair, the interior beautifully frescoed and gilded, and the votive offerings that adorn the walls are many of them new, and show that the people still retain their faith in the Virgin of this shrine.

Rising from the centre of the fertile and extensive plain of Cholula, this ancient pyramid, with its modern capstone, can be seen from the distance of many a league. Most beautiful is the landscape spread out at its base! long, level fields of corn and maguey are on every side; villages of low mud huts rise hardly above the tops of the corn, so humble the first and so rank and luxuriant the last. Conspicuous here are the churches, that tower like giants among pygmies above the lonely cabins, adorn every hill, and claim attention on every side. They are the parasites that have sapped this fair land of its life-blood,—have gathered to themselves the wealth of the natives, and kept the country poor and wretched for three hundred years. Before Cortés drew the accursed trail of his army along this beautiful country, Cholula, it is related, possessed a population of forty thousand souls; now the little village scarce numbers six thousand. In his second letter to Charles V., Cortés describes the town as containing twenty thousand houses and four hundred "mosques," or temples. Gone are the magnificent temples and sculptures that adorned its site; the books that recorded their traditions were destroyed by order of the Spanish priests, and only the ruins of their mighty teocalli, with the paltry and contemptible temple of the conquerors, perched like the parasitic mistletoe on the rugged oak, remain to attest their greatness.

The village of Cholula lies crouched at the base of the pyramid. The largest of its religious edifices is the convent, more than two hundred years old; in its spacious court several thousand men could be quartered; it has shared the fate of many another of its order, and has been neglected, perhaps confiscated, but is now being again brought into use. Perhaps I should not have noticed this, had it not been for a severe rap these Catholics have administered upon Protestant knuckles, in the shape of four large paintings in the chapel. The first