It was easy to build an Indian city that would present a most imposing appearance, for the climate was well fitted for drying mud thoroughly. Besides, there was an inexhaustible supply of pumice-stone (tepetate), and an exceedingly soft, gray quarry stone, for caps and lintels, with an excellent quality of cement, and material for "fresco painting" of the walls, abundant and cheap. All these articles are combined in the building of the modern city, and give it its present appearance of elegance and great durability. But in the old city, one-story palaces of dried mud, plastered and frescoed, with large interior courts like that I have described at Tezcuco, must have been among the most imposing structures. If tepetate was employed in the construction of the royal palaces, it would not have added materially to the weight resting upon the earthy foundations; for when the water in the ditches occupied half the street, the foundations must have been so much softer than at present, that structures of the lightest material only could be borne.
In his anxiety to keep up a resemblance between his conquests and that of Granada, Cortéz calls the teocallis, or Indian mounds which he found, mosques, and speaks of "forty towers, the largest of which has fifty steps leading to its main body, and is higher than the tower of the principal church in Seville." Bernal Diaz says there were "115 steps to the summit."
I must reduce the size of this great pyramid to the size of the isolated rock that the Cathedral is said to occupy. The difficulty of getting rid of the earth that composed these forty artificial mountains does not seem to have troubled historians so much as it would a contractor.
I have often thought that those hillocks of earth on the north side of the town were once small artificial mounds on which the Indians offered their worship, for in the canal near by was found that collection of clay divinities of which I have already spoken.
The difficulty in the way of forming a correct idea of that old city, is owing to the defective character of our witnesses. The one confesses to