We saw some good things in a small collection of antiquities, on this second visit to Tezcuco.  Among them was a nude female figure in alabaster, four or five feet high, and—­comparatively speaking—­of high artistic merit.  Such figures are not common in Mexico, and they are supposed to represent the Aztec Venus, who was called Tlazolteocihua, “Goddess of Pleasure.”  A figure, laboriously cut in hard stone, representing a man wearing a jackal’s head as a mask, was supposed to be a figurative representation of the celebrated king of Tezcuco, Nezahualcoyotl, “hungry jackal,” of whom Mexican history relates that he walked about the streets of his capital in disguise, after the manner of the Caliph in the Arabian Nights.  The explanation is plausible, but I think not correct.  The coyote or jackal was a sacred animal among the Aztecs, as the Anubis-jackal was among the Egyptians.  Humboldt found in Mexico the tomb of a coyote, which had been carefully interred with an earthen vase, and a number of the little cast-bronze bells which I noticed in the last chapter.  The Mexicans used actually to make a kind of fetish—­or charm—­of a jackal’s skin, prepared in a peculiar way, and called by the same name, nezahualcoyotl, and very likely they do so still.  From this fetish the king’s name was, no doubt, borrowed; and it is not improbable that the whole story of the king’s walking in disguise may have grown up out of his name being the same as that of the figure we saw, muffled up in a jackal’s skin.

It is curious that the jackal, or the human figure in a jackal-mask, should have been an object of superstitious veneration both in Mexico and in Egypt.  This, the extraordinary serpent-crown of Xochicalco, and the pyramids, are the three most striking resemblances to be found between the two countries; all probably accidental, but not the less noteworthy on that account.

The collection contained a number of spherical beads in green jade, highly polished, and some as large as pigeon’s eggs.  They were found in an alabaster box, of such elaborate and beautiful workmanship that the owner deemed it worthy to be presented as a sort of peace-offering to the wife of President Santa Ana.

The word coyotl in the name of the Tezcucan king is the present word coyote—­a jackal.  Though unknown in English, it has passed, with several Spanish words, into what we may call the American dialect of our language.  Prairie-hunters and Californians have introduced several other words in this way, such as ranch, gulch, corral, &c.

The word lariat one is constantly meeting with in books about American prairies.  A horse-rope, or a lazo, is called in Spanish reata; and, by absorbing the article, la reata is made into lariat, just as such words as alligator, alcove, and pyramid were formed.  The flexible leather riding-whip or cuarta is apparently the quirt that some American politicians use in arguing with their opponents.