Still, our suspicions and reservations notwithstanding, we endeavor to keep an open mind. If this loathly old man is not capriciously lying or making mock of us, then that southern nation's alleged devotion to an all-highest being and to a cruciform holy symbol could be an anomaly of genuine interest to theologians. Therefore we have sent a mission of Dominican friars into that region to investigate the alleged phenomenon and we will report the results to Your Majesty in due course.
In the meantime, Sire, may Our Lord God and Jesus Christ His Son lavish blessings on Your Ineffable Majesty, that you prosper in all your undertakings, and may you look as beneficently on Your S.C.C.M.'s loyal servant,
(ecce signum) Zumárraga
SEXTA PARS
I think I remember every single incident of every single day of that, my first expedition, both going and returning. On later journeys I became uncaring of minor mishaps and even some major ones, of blistered feet and callused hands, of weather enervatingly hot or achingly cold, of the sometimes sickening foods I ate and waters I drank, or the not infrequent lack of any food or water at all. I learned to numb myself, like a drugged priest in trance, to endure without even noticing the many dreary days and roads on which nothing happened at all, when there was nothing to do but plod onward through country of no interest or color or variety.
But on that first journey, simply because it was my first, every least object and occurrence was of interest to me, even the occasional hardships and annoyances, and I conscientiously set them down in my word-picture account of the expedition. The Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl, to whom I delivered those bark papers on our return, surely found portions of them hard to decipher, owing to their having suffered the ravages of weather, and submersion in streams we forded, and their having often been blotted by my own sweat. Since Ahuítzotl was a considerably more experienced traveler than I was at that time, he also probably smiled at much in my accounts that naively extolled the ordinary and elucidated the obvious.
But those foreign lands and peoples were already beginning to change, even that long ago, what with the incursions of us pochtéa and other explorers bringing to them articles and customs and ideas and words they had never known before. Nowadays, with your Spanish soldiers, your settlers, your missionaries fanning out everywhere, no doubt the natives of those regions are changing beyond even their own recognition. So, whatever less lasting things I accomplished in my lifetime, I would be pleased to think that I did leave for future scholars a record of how those other lands looked, and what their people were like, in the years when they were still largely unknown to the rest of The One World.
If, as I tell you of that first journey, my lords, you should find some of my descriptions of landscapes, of persons, of events, to sound somewhat vague of detail, you must blame my limited eyesight. If, on the other hand, I vividly describe some things you would suppose I could not have seen, you may assume that I am filling in the details from my recollections of later travels along the same route, when I had the ability and opportunity to look more closely and clearly.
On a long journey, allowing for both the arduous trails and the easy, a train of laden men could count on averaging about five one-long-runs between dawn and dark. We covered only half that distance on our first day's march, merely crossing the long causeway to Coyohuacan on the southern mainland, and halting well before sundown to spend the night there, for the next day's march would be no easy one. As you know, this lake region lies in a bowl of land. To get out of it in any direction means climbing to and over its rim. And the mountains to the south, beyond Coyohuacan, are the most precipitous of all those ringing the bowl.
Some years ago, when the first Spanish soldiers came to this country, and when I had first attained some grasp of their language, one of them—watching a file of tamémime trudging along with burdens on their backs and tumplines around their foreheads—asked me, "Why in God's name did not you stupid brutes ever think to use wheels?"
I was not then very familiar with "God's name," but I knew very well what "wheels" were. When I was a small child, I had a toy armadillo made of clay, which I pulled about on a string. Since the armadillo's legs naturally could not walk, the toy was mounted on four little wooden wheels to make it mobile. I told of that to the Spaniard and he demanded, "Then why the Devil did none of you use wheels for transport, like those on our cannons and caissons?" I thought it a foolish question, and I said so, and I got a blow in the face for my insolence.
We knew the utility of round wheels, for we moved extremely heavy things like the Sun Stone by rolling them on logs placed under and ahead of them. But such rollers would have been ineffectual for lighter work, and there were in these lands no animals like your horses and mules and oxen and donkeys, to pull wheeled vehicles. Our only beasts of burden were ourselves, and a hard-muscled tamémi can carry nearly half his own weight for a long distance without strain. If he put that load on wheels, to pull or push it, he would simply be burdened by the extra weight of the wheels, and they would be even more of a hindrance in rough terrain.
Now you Spaniards have laid out many roads, and your animals do the work while your teamsters ride or walk unladen, and I grant that a procession of twenty heavy wagons drawn by forty horses is a fine spectacle. Our little train of three merchants and twelve slaves surely did not look so impressive. But we transported all our wares and most of the provisions for the journey on our own backs and legs, with at least two advantages: we had no voracious draft animals to feed and care for, and our exertions made us the stronger each day.
Indeed, the hard-driving Blood Glutton made us all endure more than necessary exertions. Even before we left Tenochtítlan, and at every night's halt along the way, he led the slaves—and Cozcatl and myself, when we were not otherwise occupied—in practice with the spears we all carried. (He himself carried a formidable personal armory of long spear, javelin and throwing stick, maquahuitl and short knife, a bow and a quiver full of arrows.) It was not difficult for Blood Glutton to convince the slaves that they would be better treated by us than by any bandits who might "liberate" them, and that they had good reason to help us repel any bandits who might attack, and he showed them how.
After stopping the night in a Coyohuacan inn, we marched early again the next morning because, said Blood Glutton, "We must get across the badlands of Cuicuilco before the sun rises high." That name means The Place of Sweet Singing, and perhaps it was once such a place, but it is no longer. It is now a barren of gray-black rock, of waves and ripples and billows of pock-marked rock. From its appearance it could have been a foaming river cascade turned hard and black by the curse of some sorcerer. In actuality, it is a dried flow of lava from the volcano Xitli, which has been dead for so many sheaves of years that only the gods know when it erupted and obliterated The Place of Sweet Singing. That obviously was a city of some size, but there is no knowing what people built it and lived there. The only remaining visible edifice is a pyramid, half buried under the far edge of the lava plain. It is not square-sectioned like most in these lands. The Cuicuilco pyramid, or what can be seen of it, is a conical stack of round terraces.
The bleak black plain, whatever sweetness and song it may once have had, is now no place to linger in the daytime, for its porous lava rock sucks in the sun's heat and exhales it doubly or trebly hot. Even in the cool of that early morning long ago, that wasteland was no pleasant place to traverse. Nothing, not so much as a weed grows there, and no bird chirps, and the only sound we heard was the clangor of our footsteps, as if we walked across the great empty water jars of departed giants.