Page:Young Folks History Of Mexico.pdf/392

 386 the 28th of November, 1607. Fifteen thousand Indians worked incessantly for eleven months, at the end of which time the tunnel was completed. It was six thousand six hundred meters in length, over three meters in height and four in breadth, and was continued at its northern end by an open cut eight thousand six hundred meters in length, that conducted the water of the lake into the river Tula, which finally makes its way into the Gulf of Mexico.

This tunnel having become stopped up, either by accident or design, the city was at once flooded in a single night, and for five years, from 1629 to 1634, the people traversed the flooded streets in canoes.

In 1637 the Franciscan monks secured control of the work, which they held for over a hundred years, and diverted through this channel a vast amount of gold into their treasury; though the water flowed no more freely than before. In 1767 it was decided to convert this subterranean canal into an open cut, as it frequently became choked, and endangered the city. Thousands of Indians lost their lives in both undertakings; but life was cheap in those days, and labors were performed that to-day it would be impossible to execute.

At a cost of a million dollars, the cut was concluded, in the year 1789. It was then 67,537 feet in length, and in some places, at the top, over 600 feet in breadth, with a perpendicular depth of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet!

This was the great tajo, or cut, of Nochistongo, which had cost, at the beginning of the present century only, over $6,000,000 and a vast number of lives. It performed its work ineffectually, and the government of Mexico is yet considering,—at this day, two hundred and seventy-five years after the tunnel was dug,—how it should properly drain the great valley in the centre of which is the magnificent