Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/98

90 Spanish writers. But instead of there being eight great stones in every column, as they say, there are in some cases nine, and even ten. This, however, is of little moment; there may have been ten in every column,—probably were,—the topmost one of which may have fallen off. Thus the column would be finished when an even two hundred years had swung its round, and then left to stand forever, as a monument to the people who had erected it and as an epoch in the world's great cycle.

Thirty-six columns, each representing 160 or 200 years, as the case may be, carry their antiquity back to a very early date indeed. "There was," says a learned writer, "an undeniable lapse of 5,760 years from the time the first stone was placed on the platform until the place was abandoned; and we know that this very town of Aké was still inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest." Whether this be so, or, as another erudite