Yet Tlascala was undismayed by the new combination brought to bear against her, and did not readily listen to the proposed alliance of Cortéz. It was only after three terrible battles with Cortéz, that Tlascala learned to appreciate the value of his alliance—an alliance which has conferred upon her perpetual freedom and a distinct political organization to the present time.
This is the poetry of the thing. Let us give it a little matter-of-fact examination.
The spot on which I stand, instead of being what it has often been represented to be, is but a shapeless mass of earth 205 feet high, occupying a village square of 1310 feet. It is sufficiently wasted by time to give full scope to the imagination to fill out or restore it to almost any form.
One hundred years ago, some rich citizen constructed steps up its side, and protected the sides of his steps from falling earth by walls of adobe, or mud-brick; and on the west side some adobe buttresses have been placed to keep the loose earth out of the village street. This is all of man's labor that is visible, except the work of the Indians in shaving away the hill which constitutes this pyramid.
As for the great city of Cholula, it never had an existence; for if there had been, only three hundred years ago, such a city here, composed of 40,000 houses, with 400 towers, besides the 400 mosques, then some vestige or fragment of a fallen wall or a ruined tower would still be visible. But I searched in vain for the slightest evidence of former magnificence, and was driven to the unwelcome conclusion that the whole city was fabricated out of some miserable Indian village, inferior, perhaps, to the present town of one-story, whitewashed mud huts.
My contemplations were broken in upon by a swarm of squalid women and children from the church vestry, importuning me to buy relics in