the squares, the houses and the courts of Tlaltelolco were covered with dead bodies; we could not step without treading on them; the lake and canals were filled with them, and the stench was intolerable. For this reason, our troops, immediately after the capture of the royal family, retired to their quarters."
In order to cleanse the city the inhabitants were ordered into the country, the decaying corpses were buried, and great fires were kindled to purify the air. "For three days and nights the causeways were full, from one end to the other, of men, women, and children so weak and sickly, squalid and dirty and pestilential, that it was misery to behold them. Some miserable wretches were creeping about in a famished condition through the deserted streets; the ground was all broken up to get at the roots of such vegetation as it afforded, the very trees were stripped of their bark, and there was no water in the town. . . . During all their distress, however, though their constant practice was to feast on such as they took prisoners, no instance occurred of their having preyed upon each other; yet certainly there never existed since the creation a people which suffered so much from hunger, thirst, and warfare."
"Thus," says another historian, "did Providence, in conducting the Spaniards, a polished nation of Europe, to overturn the rude monarchy of the Mexicans, in America, punish the latter for the injustice, cruelty, and superstition of their ancestors. But there the victors, in one year of merciless massacre, sacrificed more human victims to avarice and ambition than the Indians during the existence of their empire had devoted in worship to their native gods. There the legislative art of Europe corrected the bloody policy of American tribes, and introduced the ministry of justice, by despoiling Indian caciques of their territories and tributes, torturing them for gold and enslaving their
