ranchero, the traveller at length stands before the remains of the elegant structure that once crowned the summit with its carved and massive architecture. The reports of engineers who visited this pyramid in years long past, and the legends of the neighborhood, declared that it originally consisted of five stories, placed upon each other at regular intervals and separated by narrow platforms. But of all these, nothing now remains except portions of the first body, which is formed of cut porphyry and covered with the singular emblems which are accurately represented in the annexed plate of the north-western angle.
Amid the neglect of the viceroyal government, and the revolutionary disturbances subsequent to the rebellion against Spain, this beautiful monument of ancient art, seems to have been entirely forgotten, save by the neighboring haciendados or planters, who used it as a quarry, from which they might supply the wants of their estates without the trouble or expense of a stone cutter. In the middle of the eighteenth century the fine terraces were yet perfect. But, as the country became settled in the neighborhood, the farmers began to pilfer from the mass, and, not long before we visited it in 1842, an adjacent land owner had carried off large loads of the sculptured stones to build a dam in a neighboring ravine, for the use of his cattle.