Remembering Tenochtitlan
"Retracing my steps, and entering the modern city, after having caught a glimpse of that of other days, I was assailed by a doubt..."
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From The Aztecs: Their History, Manners, and Customs by Lucien Biart, 1900.
My mind filled with the pompous descriptions of the conquering Spaniards, I chanced, on leaving the shady woods of Chapultepec, to stop to contemplate at leisure the beautiful valley, in the middle of which rose the curious Venice of the New World. The lakes which rendered it celebrated are now half dried up, saline efflorescences cover the sterile sand of their ancient beds, and have robbed it of part of its beauty. But the Cordilleras, several leagues distant, still surround it like a cloudy girdle, to which morning and evening the sun lends an embroidery of gold. Toward the east the three great unchanging volcanoes of the Temperate Lands raise their snowy peaks, shining as if on fire; vultures, the old and faithful guests of this privileged region, circle in a pale-blue sky incomparable in its serenity.
Turned towards the west, seeing some Aztecs moving around me clothed in a costume very much like that which they wore in the time of their emperors, and still speaking the imaged language, so sweet in the mouths of the Nahuas, in imagination I carried myself back into the past, so near us but nevertheless so mysterious. Assailed by my historic memories, I gradually ceased to see the steeples and domes of the modern city, and I called up the Mexico of ancient times, the Tenochtitlan of Moteuczoma, with its temples, its palaces, its towers, its terraces, its canals, its boats, its floating islands, its vegetation, and its peculiar people.
The immense pyramid, with five superposed steps, which so strongly excited the admiration of the conquerors, then suddenly raised its abruptly truncated form on an azure base before my eyes. On the vast platform, so often covered with blood, the chapels of Tlaloc and of Huitzilipochtli arose, as formerly, their storied towers surmounted by cupolas. Toward the north, the great causeway of Lake Chaleo seemed an immense bridge. Lower down, the enclosing wall of the temple, with its bas-reliefs representing enormous inter- twined serpents, reflected in the clear wave its white brilliant line, which the sun’s rays made as bright, Cortez says, as silver.
Around the vast edifice — the most important of the architectural works undertaken by the Aztecs, and at the foot of which two braziers always burned — I counted, one by one, the forty lesser temples enumerated by the historians. To the left, the circular teocalli of Quetzacoatl, with its fantastic gate representing the open jaws of a serpent. A little farther, the place devoted to religious dances, the colleges or seminaries, the sacrificial stones; and then in the rear, the special temples of Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca.
Next came the temple of the planet Venus, with its high column bearing the image of the star, reproduced a hundred times by its neighbor, the “house of mirrors.” More distant, the “house of shells,” its roof covered with shells of mollusks, the variegated colors of which shone in the sun, shaded the platform on which rested the stone for the gladiators. The Epcoatl, raised in honor of the Tlalocs, was side by side with the Macuilcalli, where spies were punished with death. Between the Teotlalpan, raised in honor of Mixcohuatl, and the sanctuary of Istacinteutl, the white god to whom lepers were immolated, rose the Tlalxico, dedicated to the master of the infernal regions, the sombre Mictlanteuctli. Lastly, outside of the sacred enclosure the two great ossuaries, the sight of which terrified the Spaniards, showed their massive oblong forms, and displayed, the one its prodigious pile of human bones, the other the garland of skulls with which it was crowned.
The palace of the Emperor, with its pink walls, its porticos, its columns of agate and porphyry, its twenty doors, its sculptured friezes, its courts, its fountains and its gardens,— itself eclipsed, nevertheless, by the cyclopean proportions of the great temple, — eclipsed, in turn, by its dimensions, the aristocratic dwellings by which it was surrounded, palaces surmounted by terraces with embattled parapets.
In the distance, a thousand temples or chapels, with many-colored stones, natural or painted, like immense mosaics. Three hundred and sixty towers rose proudly toward the heavens and looked down upon the city. Here and there sombre masses of foliage of cedars and cypresses — trees always dear to the Aztecs — attracted my eyes, and made still more striking the whiteness of the sixty thousand houses occupied by the people, who in the suburbs merely sheltered themselves under thatched roofs artistically arranged. In my imagination I seemed to hear in the noise of the modern city the cries of the victim whose heart was being torn out, and in the reddish mist which generally floats above the hill of Penon I thought I saw vapors reeking with blood.
Outside of the city, as if to protect it, and simply placed on the ground, was a number of granite monsters in fantastic postures, grinning images of fierce gods. Here was Tlaloc, with his projecting teeth, intended to mangle the breast of children; there Huitzilipochtli, with his standard, his serpents, his funereal insignia. On the sides of the causeways were seats consecrated to Tezcatlipoca, altars decked with garlands of verdure by his devotees.
The sumptuous Tenochtitlan was built in the shade of Penon, in the midst of a flora of incomparable richness, on a soil which, owing to the abundance of the waters by which, it was surrounded, was then still more fertile than it is to-day. In this beautiful climate, in the centre of a lake with calm, blue waters, in a valley which seems a garden of flowers, which is cheered by the harmonious songs of splendidly-plumed birds, under a sky which is troubled only by storms of short duration, why were there everywhere terrible divinities, images of death, which it was necessary to ceaselessly glut with blood? Was it not to their gentle climate that the Greeks owed their cheerful imagination?
The shades of evening invading the valley effaced my dreams of the past, very incomplete, alas! Retracing my steps, and entering the modern city, after having caught a glimpse of that of other days, I was assailed by a doubt. I asked myself, as a celebrated Mexican writer, Lucas Alaman, had done unknown to me, if the ancient city of Tenochtitlan had ever really been as magnificent as it has been described to us, and as I had reconstructed it in thought. To what miracle is it owing that not a fragment of the walls of the splendid palaces which it contained is left standing? How have its three hundred towers, its marble columns, its columns of jasper and porphyry described in such pompous words, fallen without leaving a trace after them?
Rome, sacked by barbarians, still shows its walls half crumbled away, and its mutilated statues. Without seeking so far for examples, the Zapotec sees the superb tombs of Mictlan rise above the tangled brush-wood, Cholula shows us its pyramid, Palenque its bas-reliefs, Chichen-Itza its marvellous architecture. In Mexico, younger by ten centuries, there are scarcely any traces of the past; the modern city is not even built, as one might suppose, with the ruins of its ancestor.
Up to the present time the excavations — insufficient and badly directed, it is true — have yielded but a small number of statues or bas-reliefs. The Spaniards have razed all the buildings and pulverized all the images. But to what wind have they cast this dust, so that no field is whitened with it? This is certainly a problem. On the one side are unanimous affirmations, on the other the absence of sufficient material proofs to demonstrate to us that the witnesses have observed clearly. Indeed, Tenochtitlan was a great city, the causeways which connected it with the land are grand works still admired; but is it not strange that two thousand temples, a hundred palaces, a thousand sumptuous dwellings, should have disappeared to give room to a new city, leaving but little more trace of them than a mirage or the last year’s snow?
We do not exaggerate. If no vestige of the grand buildings of the past is now seen in Mexico, from time to time we discover, generally near the cathedral, when the soil is disturbed in public works, walls, statues, bas-reliefs, treasures concealed, in all probability, by Bishop Zumarraga and his missionaries. There lies, perhaps, part of the city for which I have sought in vain. It is to be hoped that the capital of Mexico, so devoted to the arts, may some day carry out the labors necessary to exhume the monuments of its history, buried a few feet under the ground, and which it has trod upon for too long a time with an indifference unworthy of its high civilization.
Biart, Lucien. The Aztecs: Their History, Manners, and Customs. Translated by John Leslie Garner, A.C. McClurg & Co, 1900.
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