34 



SPANIARDS ENTER THE CAPITAL. 



thanked him for his friendly welcome and bounteous gifts, — and 

 hung around his neck a chain set with colored crystal. Monte- 

 zuma then opened his gates to the Spaniards and appointed his 

 brother to conduct the General with his troops, to the city. 



Here he found a spacious edifice, surrounded by a wall, assigned 

 for his future residence; and, having stationed sentinels, and placed 

 his cannon on the battlements so as to command all the important 

 avenues to his palace, he proceeded to examine the city and to 

 acquaint himself with the character, occupations, and temper of 

 the people. 1 



1 " The province which constitutes the principal territory of Montezuma," (says 

 Cort£z in his letter to Charles the V.,) " is circular, and entirely surrounded by 

 lofty and rugged mountains, and the circumference of it is full seventy leagues. 

 In this plain there are two lakes which nearly occupy the whole of it, as the people 

 use canoes for more than fifty leagues round. One of these lakes is of fresh water, 

 and the other, which is larger, is of salt water. They are divided, on one side, by 

 a small collection of high hills, which stand in the centre of the plain, and they 

 unite in a level strait formed between these hills and the high mountains, which 

 strait is a gun-shot wide, and the people of the cities and other settlements which 

 are in these lakes, communicate together in their canoes by water, without the 

 necessity of going by land. And as this great salt lake ebbs and flows with the 

 tide, as the sea does, in every flood the water flows from it into the other fresh 

 lake as impetuously as if it were a large river, and consequently at the ebb, the 

 fresh lake flows into the salt. 



" This great city of Temixtitlan, (meaning Tenochtitlan, Mexico,) is founded 

 in this salt lake ; and from terra firma to the body of the city, the distance is two 

 leagues on whichever side they please to enter it. 



" It has four entrances, or causeways, made by the hand of man, as wide as two 

 horsemen's lances. 



" The city is as large as Seville and Cordova. The streets (I mean the principal 

 ones,) are very wide, and others very narrow; and some of the latter and all the 

 others are one-half land and the other half water, along which the inhabitants go 

 in their canoes ; and all the streets, at given distances, are open, so that the water 

 passes from one to the other ; and in all their openings, some of which are very 

 wide, there are very wide bridges, made of massive beams joined together and well 

 wrought ; and so wide that ten horsemen may pass abreast over many of them." — 

 Letters of Cortez to Charles V. 



