36 Singing Valleys 



for the great nation that once held Yucatan. Probably many 

 of the Maya were assimilated by the Aztec confederacy. Doubt- 

 less many more died at the hands of the Caribs who were in 

 the habit of swooping down on the coast towns of the isthmus 

 burning and killing, carrying away women and a number of 

 young men who were not too sinewy to make a stew. 



Too, for nearly two hundred years before Cortes, the Maya 

 were torn by civil war that raged between two rival families 

 the Cocoms, whose totem was a pheasant, and the Kius, whose 

 emblem was a plant. The Mayan Wars of the Plants and the 

 Pheasants were worse than the British Wars of the Roses. 

 They exhausted the last strength of the first corn-planters. In 

 the course of the struggle, the milpas were deserted, the 

 granaries burned. There was little energy left in the Maya to 

 resist the white men who landed from enormous ships, and 

 who rode inland on great beasts, the like of which had never 

 been seen in the Americas before. 



Cortes and his army passed through Maya-land meeting 

 with amazingly little opposition, and up into the mountains 

 toward the Valley of Anahuac. It was August; everywhere their 

 eyes rested on fields of golden corn. 



The Aztecs and other tribes of the Nahua confederacy which 

 at this time controlled practically the whole of Mexico had 

 greatly improved their primitive husbandry. Though they did 

 not know the use of iron, they had tools of copper and tin, 

 and plows of hardwood. They irrigated their fields, and there 

 were strict laws to protect the forests which safeguarded the 

 rainfall. The Valley of Anahuac was magnificently wooded 

 until the Spaniards denuded it of its cypress and larch groves, 

 as they had previously deforested Moorish Andalusia. 



Having a cereal maize which yields a harvest when it is 

 merely scratched into the earth and left to itself to mature, 

 and which, when planted in tilled land, gives, with very little 

 cultivation, twice as much food per acre as any other grain, 

 the Aztecs had attained to great land wealth. Taxes were paid 

 in maize which was gathered into the national granaries and 



