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They carved names and messages for those that were to come after, with flint knives, with swords and Spanish daggers. Men are all very much alike," said the Road-Runner. On the smooth sandstone cliffs the children could make out strange, weathered picture-writings, and twisty inscriptions in much abbreviated Spanish which they could not read.
The bishop who authenticated the miracle was no less a person than Fray Juan de Zumarraga, whose name is well known in Mexican history, for it was he who collected together all the Aztec picture-writings that he could find, "quite a mountain of them," say the chroniclers, and made a solemn bonfire of them in the great square of Tlatelolco.
In the ancient picture-writings, however, the Indians are paddling their canoes with a kind of oar, shaped at the end like one of our fire-shovels.
On an island in the lake of Tezcuco, they found eagle, serpent, cactus, and rock, as described, and they settled there in due course. What fragment of truth is hidden in this myth it is hard to say. Tenochtitlán means "The Stone-cactus place;" and the Aztec picture-writings express its name by a hieroglyph of a prickly pear growing on a rock.
From the fibers of some of the desert plants they made fabrics with which to clothe themselves, and they cultivated cotton. They were deft artists in picture-writings, which they etched on the rocks. Many interesting vestiges of their ancient art remain, testifying to their skill as savage artisans.
My knowledge of such matters being then but scant, I could tell only that this was a record, at once historical and geographical, of a tribal migration; and I saw at a glance that it was unlike either of the famous picture-writings which record the migration of the Aztecs from Culhuacan to the Valley of Mexico, and then about that valley until their final settlement in Tenochtitlan.
These are bronze needles, resembling our packing-needles, and little cast bronze bells, called in Aztec yotl, not unlike small horse-bells made in England at the present day; these are figured in the tribute-lists in the picture-writings. Apropos of the mammoth bones preserved in the Mexican Museum, I must insert a quotation from Bernal Diaz.
There are also hieroglyphic figures far up on the rocks of Lake Chelan, which is supposed to have once been an arm of the Columbia. These paintings or picture-writings must have been made when the water was so high in the lakes that they could be done by men in boats.
The real proof of their having, at some early period, communicated with inhabitants of Europe or Asia rests upon the traditions current among them, which are recorded by the early historians, and confirmed by the Aztec picture-writings; and upon several extraordinary coincidences in the signs used by them in reckoning astronomical cycles. Further on I shall allude to these traditions.
The curious perforated eye-plates of the Xochicalco chief, which he wore apparently to keep arrows and javelins out of his eyes, are part of the equipment of the Aztec warrior in the picture-writings, while Palenque and Copan seemed to afford no instance of them; so that in two peculiarities the remarkable sculpture before us seems to belong rather to Yucatan than to Mexico, and in one to Mexico rather than to Yucatan.
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