his right hand he held foure darts which signified the chastisement he gave to the wicked for their sins.… They held this idoll Tescatlipuca for the god of drought, of famine, barrenness and pestilence. And therefore they painted him in another form, being set in great majesty upon a stoole, compassed in with a red curtin, painted and wrought with the heads and bones of dead men. In the left hand it had a target with five pines, like unto pine apples of cotton, and in the right a little dart with a threatening countenance, and the arm stretched out as if he would cast it and from the target came foure darts. It had the countenance of an angry man and in choller, the body all painted blacke and the head full of quailes feathers.”
Bernal Diaz says of him (bk. vi. c. 91):
“Then we saw on the other side on the left hand there stood the other great image the same height as Huichilobos, and it had a face like a bear44 and eyes that shone, made of their mirrors which they call Tezcat, and the body plastered with precious stones like that of Huichilobos, for they say that the two are brothers; and this Tezcatepuca was the god of Hell and had charge of the souls of the Mexicans, and his body was girt with figures like little devils with snakes’ tails.”
Face-mask.—When Cortéz landed at Vera Cruz, the messengers of Motecuhzoma tendered him, along with other presents, “the ornaments or finery with which Tezcatlipocâ was decorated.” The mask belonging to this costume is still in existence, and is to be seen in the room devoted to American antiquities in the British Museum. It consists of a human skull encrusted with mosaic in alternate bands of black and green, the nasal cavity being