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Cortès was at length confirmed in the position he held after incidents which would take too long to relate, and which caused him to say, "It has been harder for me to fight against my countrymen than against the Aztecs." It now remained to him to organize the conquered country, and he began by establishing the seat of government at Mexico, which he rebuilt.
Meanwhile many of the places in the neighbourhood sent in their submission to Cortés, and several noble Aztecs fell into his hands. These men he employed to bear a message to Guatemozin, in which he deprecated the necessity of the present hostilities, and declared himself willing to forget the past, inviting the Mexicans by a timely submission to save their capital from the horrors of a siege.
In vain the Spanish artillery were brought up, and their fire swept away the barricades; there were still others behind, and at each the desperate fight was renewed. Coming down from the side streets, the Aztecs fell upon the Spanish flanks; and clouds of missiles were shot from the boats, which crowded the canals everywhere intersecting the streets.
If the country had never, in the previous ages, felt the influence of a higher culture than that of the Aztecs, it would not have now, and never could have had, ruined cities like Mitla, Copan, and Palenque.
We might watch Scotch, and Australians, and Jews, and French, and Aztecs spreading dust round the body of a dead man, that the footprints of his ghost, or of other ghosts, may be detected next morning. We might point to a similar device in a modern novel, where the presence of a ghost is suspected, as proof of the similar workings of the Australian mind and of the mind of Mrs. Riddell.
Again the air-ship circled over the valley, in spite of the moonlight passing wholly unseen and unsuspected by the Aztecs, whose energies were bent on ferreting out mortal foes, not demons of the upper world.
But, whatever the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs connected with the noise, may be, no one would explain them as the result of community of race between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered to account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of furniture is an omen of death in a house.
Here the Spaniards halted for some days, fighting almost daily with the Aztecs. In one encounter, Cortez allowed himself to be decoyed on to the great causeway, upon which he had before suffered such disaster.
The Aztecs never kill if they can help it, but take prisoners, so that death comes to them in one way instead of another; and it is better to be killed in the service of the gods, than to fall uselessly in battle." "I don't think so at all, Malinche. In battle one's blood's up, and one scarcely feels pain; and if one is killed one is killed, and there is an end of it.
Far away towards the Pacific Ocean there stood, in a beautiful and most fertile valley, the capital of a great and powerful empire, called by its inhabitants 'Tenochtitlan, but known to the Europeans only by its other name of 'Mexico, derived from 'Mexitli, the war-god of the Aztecs.
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