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"Montezuma is mild and gentle in his disposition, and quite unlike his two predecessors, who were mighty warriors; and doubtless, in his heart, he will welcome the words you said yesterday concerning Quetzalcoatl. But he is swayed wholly by the priests, and such sentiments will not be agreeable to them, for sacrifices are forever going on at the teocalli.
They in turn consulted among themselves, and at length gave me this answer: that it was agreed that all the wounded and aged there, together with most of the children, and with them any others who wished to go, should leave the teocalli that night, to find their way out of the city if they could, or if not, to trust to the mercy of the Spaniards.
Only once were they forced to make a brief detour in order to escape meeting another redskin, and then a guarded whisper from the lips of the Aztec warned Bruno that they were almost at the teocalli wherein the Children of the Sun made their home and abiding-place.
And so, his petition finally denied, with no other course left open to take, the Red Heron summoned his picked band and, with the Sun Children in their midst, left the temple, crossed the plain, and slowly marched into the War God's teocalli.
You will remember that the huge pyramid-shaped teocalli was built in five divisions, growing smaller and smaller, till at the top you came out upon a square platform, crowned only by the two sanctuaries in which stood the images of the Aztec gods.
I have mentioned already the great drum which Bernal Diaz saw when he went up the Mexican teocalli with Cortes, and which he describes as a hellish instrument, made with skins of great serpents; and which, when it was struck, gave a loud and melancholy sound, that could be heard at two leagues' distance.
The hotel only a block from the cathedral and the site of the great teocalli of the Aztecs, to which the German in Patzcuaro had directed me, differed not even in its smells from a Clark-street lodging-house in Chicago. The entire city with its cheap restaurants and sour smelling pulquerias uncountable, looked and sounded like a lower eastside New York turned Spanish in tongue.
Hastily dismounting the Spaniards sent the animals back to their quarters, and then, renewing the assault, had little difficulty in dispersing the Indians and securing a passage to the teocalli. And now began a great and terrible struggle.
Further questioning resulted in but little more information, though, as Ixtli grew calmer, he emphasised such statements as he had already made, elaborating them a trifle. And, by this, his questioners learned that, humanly speaking, the fate of the Sun God's Children depended almost entirely upon the whim or fancy of the chief paba of the teocalli.
Nor did we know if they would stop at words. At length we crossed the square beneath the shadow of the teocalli, and reached the ancient and sculptured palace as the light failed, and the smoke on Xaca, the holy hill, began to glow with the fire in its heart.
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