Ipan in chicunauitlamanpan meztica in tloque nahuaque palne nohuani teyocoyani icel teotl oquiyocox in ixquex quexquex in ittoni ihuan amo ittoni.

“In the ninth series is the Cause of All, of us and of all created things, the one only God who created all things both visible and invisible."[50]

To perpetuate the memory of this philosophic deduction he caused to be constructed at Tezcuco a stone tower nine stories in height, the ruins of which were visible long after the Spanish occupation.  To this tower he gave the name Chililitli, a term of uncertain meaning, but which we find was applied in Tenochtitlan to a building sacred to the Nine Winds.[51] To explain the introduction of this number, I should add that a certain school of Nahuatl priests taught that the heaven above and the earth below were each divided into nine concentric arcs, each leading farther and farther away from the conditions of the present life.  Hence, there were nine heavens, abodes of the gods, and nine lower regions, abodes of the souls of the dead.  Another school taught that there were not nine but thirteen of these stages.

The sixty poems by Nezahualcoyotl are mentioned by various writers as in existence after the Conquest, reduced to writing in the original tongue, and of several of them we have translations or abstracts.[52] Of four the translations claim to be complete, and were published entire for the first time in the original Spanish by Lord Kingsborough in the ninth volume of his great work on the Antiquities of Mexico.  Since then they have received various renderings in prose and verse into different languages at the hands of modern writers.

I shall give a literal prose translation from the Spanish, numbering the poems and their verses, for convenience of reference, in the order in which they appear in the pages of Lord Kingsborough.

* * * * *

The first is one referred to, and partly translated by Ixtlilxochitl, in his Historia Chichimeca (cap. 47).  He calls it a xopancuicatl (see ante, p. 15), and states that it was composed and sung on the occasion of the banquet when the king laid the foundations of his great palace.  He gives the first words in the original as follows:—­

Tlaxoconcaguican ani Nezahualcoyotzin;

And the translation:—­

“Hear that which says the King Nezahualcoyotl.”

Restoring the much mutilated original to what I should think was its proper form, the translation should read:—­

“Listen attentively to what I, the singer, the noble Nezahualcoyotl, say:”—­

I.

1.  Listen with attention to the lamentations which I, the King Nezahualcoyotl, make upon my power, speaking with myself, and offering an example to others.

2.  O restless and striving king, when the time of thy death shall come, thy subjects shall be destroyed and driven forth; they shall sink into dark oblivion.  Then in thy hand shall no longer be the power and the rule, but with the Creator, the All-powerful.