CHAPTER XI
CHOLULA THE SACRED—CRAFT MEETS CRAFT
WHEN a day's march from Cholula the army was welcomed by some of the notables of the city, but passage was refused to the Tlascalans, who encamped therefore without the gates.
As the strangers proceeded through the crowded flower-decked streets they thought they had never seen so fine a town as this sacred city of Anahuac. "It is more beautiful from without," wrote Cortés later in a letter to Charles V., "than any city in Spain, for it is many-towered and lies in a plain. And I certify to your Highness that I counted from a mosque there four hundred other mosques and as many towers. It is the city most fit for Spaniards to dwell in of any that I have seen here, for it has some untilled ground and water so that cattle might be bred, a thing which no other of the cities we have seen possesses; for such is the multitude of people who dwell in these parts that there is not a hand-breadth of uncultivated ground." The luxury of the dress and life of the Cholulans seemed in keeping with the place, but the black robes of a countless priesthood
