LETTER XX.
THE CITY OF MEXICO AS IT WAS AT THE CONQUEST.
After having given an account of the antiquities which survived the ravages of the conquerors, (who, with a blind zeal to establish their power and religion, overthrew temple, tower, and almost every record of the Indians,) it has struck me that a notice or sketch of the city of Montezuma, its sovereign and people, would not be uninteresting to even the most careless reader. I have, therefore, gathered from the letters of Cortéz to the Emperor Charles the V., and the history of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, such accounts as appear to be most authentic, not only because they impress us with the grandeur and advanced civilization of the Indians, but because they may probably serve to establish a connection between the inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico and the people who, dwelling farther south, were the builders and occupants of the temples and palaces which have lately been revealed to us in the picturesque pages of Stephens and Catherwood.
"The province which constitutes the principal territory of Montezuma," (says Cortéz in his letter to Charles the V.,) "is circular, and entirely surrounded by lofty and rugged mountains, and the circumference of it is full seventy leagues. In this plain there are two lakes which nearly occupy the whole of it, as the people use canoes for more than fifty leagues round. One of these lakes is of fresh water, and the other, which is larger, is of salt water. They are divided, on one side, by a small collection of high hills, which stand in the centre of the plain, and they unite in a level strait formed between these hills and the high mountains, which strait is a gun-shot wide, and the people of the cities and other settlements which are in these lakes, communicate together in their canoes by water, without the necessity of going by land. And as this great salt lake ebbs and flows with the tide, as the sea does, in every flood the water flows from it into the other fresh lake as impetuously as if it were a large river, and consequently at the ebb, the fresh lake flows into the salt.
"This great city of Temixtitlan, (meaning Tenotchtitlan, Mexico,) is founded in this salt lake; and from terra firma to the body of the city, the distance is two leagues on which ever side they please to enter it.
"It has four entrances, or causeways, made by the hand of man, as wide as two horsemen's lances.
