Page:Young Folks History Of Mexico.pdf/110

 104 be done. At this, the tyrant, believing the lord of Cohoacan had other motives for wishing to keep the water from him, ordered him to be murdered. A great aqueduct was constructed and the water finally received with rejoicing, the priests sacrificing birds and offering incense to the god of waters. That very year was the murdered lord avenged, for the waters rose so high as to inundate the city; and King Ahuitzotl himself, being caught by the flood in one of the lower rooms of his palace, received such a blow on his head, in getting out, as caused his death a few years later. He was obliged to call upon the King of Tezcoco to aid him in arresting the flood; the old dike was repaired, and the same priests that offered incense and sacrifices to the god of waters for the gift of the fountain, defiled the spring with their offerings in their vain attempts to make him take it back.

As kings went, in that barbaric age, old King Ahuitzotl was a very fair specimen of the whole. There was not one of them that we can recall that did not merit the punishment the Spaniards meted out to their descendants. Making every allowance for the ignorance of the age in which they lived, they were yet willfully, woefully perverse. They allowed themselves to be led by the priests, whose appetite for blood was never satisfied. And we shall see, that the nearer the rulers came to the priestly influence the more cruel they became. If you will look back through the vista afforded by this dark record, you will not fail to perceive how the priests had been preparing a structure, composed of the bones and cemented by the blood of their victims, that was to fall upon and crush its builders out of existence! Mexican progress began when Tenochtitlan was founded, in 1325; its glory culminated at the dedication of the temple, in 1486, during the reign of Ahuitzotl.