Thus sat the emperor, surrounded by a numerous fleet of canoes, whose occupants were without hope of escape or strength to fight; but, with Indian stoicism, all sat waiting their inevitable doom from freebooters whom they had disappointed of their prey.
As the emperor and his nobles sat here witnessing the destruction of their pumice-stone palaces and mud-built huts, and the filling up of their canals, they consoled themselves with the reflection that their gold and their wealth were all at the bottom of these canals, and that the Spaniards, in their hot haste to enjoy the spoils of the city, were unwittingly burying forever the prize for which they were contending.
Such were the thoughts of these Aztecs as they sat in their canoes, longing for death to relieve them from agony of suspense, enduring all the torments of the extremest thirst, which they vainly sought to quench by draughts of the brackish water of the lake.
They had not long to wait; for, by the express commands of Cortéz, his followers were mowing down unresisting citizens, because the emperor, over whom they had no control, would not surrender himself.
Who can stand for the first time upon the mountain rim that incloses this valley, and not have his thoughts carried back to some such scene as this? The recollection is not easily eradicated that the remnant of a once powerful tribe of Indians, partially emerged from barbarism, here received their death, in cold blood, at the hands of a party of white murderers. The good Archbishop Loranzana commends the piety of Cortéz in never neglecting to attend mass before going out to his daily work of slaughter. It was a pious act, no doubt, that on the last morning of the siege he stopped and listened to a mass—that pantomime which set forth the death of the Redeemer of the world—preparatory to consummating the butchery of Indians incapable of resistance.
Garci Holguin, the master of a brigantine, or rather flat-boat, bolder than the rest, drove through the fleet of canoes that occupied the basin,