As I write this, it brings to my recollection an old Roman trophy in North Italy, built—­like these pyramids—­of a shell of hewn stone, filled with rough stones and cement, now as hard as the rock itself.  There I saw the inhabitants of the town which stands at its foot, carrying off the great limestone blocks, but first cutting them up into pieces of a size that they could move about, and build into their houses.  Here and there, in this little Italian town, there were to be seen in the walls letters of the old inscription which were once upon the trophy; and the age of the houses shewed that the monument had served as a quarry for centuries.

As we rode home, we noticed by the sides of the road, and where ditches had been cut, numbers of old Mexican stone-floors covered with stucco.  The earth has accumulated above them to the depth of two or three feet, so that their position is like that of the Roman pavements so often found in Europe; and we may guess, from what we saw exposed, how great must be the number of such remains still hidden, and how vast a population must once have inhabited this plain, now almost deserted.

Two days afterwards we came back.  In the ploughed fields in the neighbourhood we made repeated trials whether it was possible to stand still in any spot where there was no relic of old Mexico within our reach; but this we could not do.  Everywhere the ground was full of unglazed pottery and obsidian; and we even found arrows and clay figures that were good enough for a museum.  When we left England, we both doubted the accounts of the historians of the Conquest, believing that they had exaggerated the numbers of the population, and the size of the cities, from a natural desire to make the most of their victories, and to write as wonderful a history as they could, as historians are prone to do.  But our examination of Mexican remains soon induced us to withdraw this accusation, and even made us inclined to blame the chroniclers for having had no eyes for the wonderful things that surrounded them.

I do not mean by this that we felt inclined to swallow the monstrous exaggerations of Solis and Gomara and other Spanish chroniclers, who seemed to think that it was as easy to say a thousand as a hundred, and that it sounded much better.  But when this class of writers are set aside, and the more valuable authorities severely criticised, it does not seem to us that the history thus extracted from these sources is much less reliable than European history of the same period.  There is, perhaps, no better way of expressing this opinion than to say that what we saw of Mexico tended generally to confirm Prescott’s History of the Conquest, and but seldom to make his statements appear to us improbable.

There are other mounds near the pyramids, besides the Micaotli.  Two sides of the Pyramid of the Sun are surrounded by them; and there are two squares of mounds at equal distances, north and south of it, besides innumerable scattered hillocks.  There are some sculptured blocks of stone lying near the pyramids, and inside the smaller one is buried what appears to be a female bust of colossal size, with the mouth like an oval ring, so common in Mexican sculptures.