With nations beyond their border little intercourse existed, yet Aztec traders, likewise playing spies, were often as far south as Nicaragua, and along the coasts of Honduras and Yucatan. There is no doubt, therefore, that the presence in those parts of the Spaniards was known to Montezuma from the first. It might have been like a voice from behind the clouds, the reports of Columbus and Pinzon, but the appearing of Córdoba and Grijalva, who talked and drew blood, was something more tangible. The people of Tuito, on the west coast of Mexico, held that before the conquest a vessel was lost there, from which had landed more than forty persons, dressed like Spaniards, and whom the natives received kindly, but finally slew because they insisted on the worship of the cross.1 A box thrown up by the waves, and containing peculiar clothing, gold rings, and a sword which no one could break, was said to have been in Montezuma’s possession. Vague as were these appearings, there was something painfully portentous in them.
For the chief divinity of the Nahua nations was Quetzalcoatl, the gentle god, ruler of the air, controller of the sun and rain, and source of all prosperity. In the palmy days of the Toltecs he had been their king, the creator of their golden age, giving them metals, improved government, and products of spontaneous growth; after which he was their god, with his chief shrine at Cholula, where surrounding peoples, even those inimical to the city, maintained temples for his worship. From toward the rising sun Quetzalcoatl had come; and he was white, with large eyes, and long black hair, and copious beard. After a final rule of twenty years at Cholula he set out for the country whence he came, and on reaching the seaboard of Goazacoalco he sailed away on a craft of snakes. His last words were that one day bearded white men, brethren of his, perhaps he himself, would come by way of the sea in which the sun rises, and would enter in and rule the land;2 and from that day, with a fidelity befitting