Page:Vol 5 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/528

508 Tacubaya road, directed against the castle front and the battery at its south-east foot. The latter contained three of the eight pieces of artillery here distributed. A fifth battery was placed to the west, with some dragoons and infantry, to check any movement on the part of Alvarez, who had advanced a few hundred feet from his former position, toward the casa mata.

Chapultepec is a picturesque mound, famed far back in the dim traditions of Aztec migrations, and later consecrated to royalty. Montezuma and his predecessors there sought distraction from administrative cares, and communed with dryad oracles in the hallowed grove, whose majestic ahuehuete cedars, furrowed by the sweep of ages, have since inspired a long line of noble viceroys and democratic presidents, and shaded the play-ground for the rising generations of successive races. The north side is inaccessibly steep, and the east and south-east nearly so, leaving a practicable slope only toward the west, besides a triangular road along the southern acclivity, protected at the knee by a bastion. At a height of 160 feet the summit extends into a terre-plein 600 feet in length, surmounted along the northern edge by a heavy yet not untasteful building, erected in 1785 for a viceregal palace. Republican rulers converted it into a college and citadel, and matched the dome and colonnade adornments with ungainly flank projections, parapets, and bomb-proofs, with adjoining bastions and outhouses, the whole enclosed by a parapet wall tapering westward in a crémaillère line to a priest-cap, and protected by ten serviceable pieces of artillery, several of heavy calibre. The slopes were, moreover, provided with walls, and on the west with ditches, mines, and a midway redan. Along the south base ran a wall 1,600 feet long, protected on the southeast by a barricade with artillery across the Tacubaya