THE LAST STAND
sudden passion, "Draw that poniard from your side, and rid me of life at once!"
"Fear not, Guatemozin," replied Cortés with courtesy, "you shall be treated with all honour. A Spaniard knows how to respect valour even in an enemy."
With a strong guard under Sandoval, Guatemozin and his beautiful young wife, Montezuma's daughter, were sent to Cojohuacan on the western shore of the lake. Alvarado and Olid were ordered to draw off the troops to their quarters on the causeways for the night, since the heaps of unburied dead made the air of the town like poison. As the royal prisoners passed out of the desolate city in the heavy dusk of the sultry summer evening, the rain came down in torrents as if to add to the gloom of the dreary scene. And all night long a terrific tropical thunderstorm raged over the valley of Mexico. In the brilliant flashes of the angry heavens the wretched Aztecs who still survived, cowering among their dead, could see the ghastly ruins of their beloved city.
But the Spanish soldiers, exultant with victory, and overjoyed that their long weeks of watching and fighting were at an end, slept in security hardly broken by the storm. So used had they become to the sounds of midnight battle, that "we felt," says Diaz, "like men suddenly escaped from a belfry where we had been shut up for months with all the bells ringing about our ears!"
In this wise, after three months' heroic defence, fell the great city of Mexico on the day of St. Hippolytus, the 13th of August 1524. Never
