38 Singing Valleys 



the beauty that filled the vale. There lay the broad, forested 

 highland, with its linked lakes and the white towns built 

 on their islands. There were acres and acres of cultivated 

 maize fields running up the inner wall of the mountains, sepa- 

 rated by hedges of cactus and yellow-flowering aloes. There 

 were the floating gardens rafts thirty to fifty feet long cov- 

 ered with rich loam in which grew beans, tomatoes, hot pep- 

 pers and the inevitable maize. These were moored in shallow 

 places in the lakes, and helped to supply the city dwellers with 

 food. There were the great palaces with their courts and outer 

 buildings, impregnable positions of defence, as the Spanish 

 warriors immediately noted. There were the flat house-roofs, 

 planted with flowers cosmos and dahlias, marigolds, sun 

 flowers, petunias and sky-blue morning glories. And rising like 

 a sentinel, the royal Hill of Chapultepec, with its crown of 

 virgin cypress. 



It was a fantastic, multi-colored civilization, set like a jewel 

 in the wilderness of the new world. Small wonder that the 

 chroniclers of the conquest compared Tenochtitlan with the 

 coffered palaces of Granada. 



The Montezuma had sent a royal palanquin to bear the 

 emissary of Spain into the capital in triumph. The chair, car- 

 ried by warriors in feather cloaks, with necklaces and bracelets 

 of turquoise and silver, and helmets of painted wood adorned 

 with feathers, was hung with curtains of padded cotton to shut 

 out the sun. Above it floated the green plumes that were the 

 symbol of the Aztec chief, a symbol adopted in honor of the 

 maize-god. 



So enthroned, Cortes was borne over the causeway and into 

 the city whose fall he plotted. Borne under the waving green 

 banners of the Corn. . . . 



There was a prophecy in this, had any of the Aztec sooth- 

 sayers been able to read it. 



The Montezuma spread a feast for the strangers. "They had 

 been long enough in the country to become reconciled to, if 



