Then he requited their treachery with another, and pursued his intended destruction of their race.  He sent a herald to the top of the Hill of Shouting, and through him announced a magnificent festival to celebrate his victory and his marriage.  The Toltecs swarmed in crowds, men, women and children, to share in the joyous scene.  Tezcatlipoca received them with simulated friendship.  Taking his drum, he began to beat upon it, accompanying the music with a song.  As his listeners heard the magic music, they became intoxicated with the strains, and yielding themselves to its seductive influence, they lost all thought for the future or care for the present.  The locality to which the crafty Tezcatlipoca had invited them was called, The Rock upon the Water.[1] It was the summit of a lofty rock at the base of which flowed the river called, By the Rock of Light.[2] When the day had departed and midnight approached, the magician, still singing and dancing, led the intoxicated crowd to the brink of the river, over which was a stone bridge.  This he had secretly destroyed, and as they came to the spot where it should have been and sought to cross, the innumerable crowd pressing one upon the other, they all fell into the water far below, where they sank out of sight and were changed into stones.

[Footnote 1:  Texcalapan, from texcalli, rock, and apan, upon or over the water.]

[Footnote 2:  Texcaltlauhco, from texcalli, rock, tlaulli, light, and the locative ending co, by, in or at.]

Is it pushing symbolism too far to attempt an interpretation of this fable, recounted with all the simplicity of the antique world, with greater directness, indeed, than I have thought wise to follow?

I am strongly inclined to regard it as a true myth, which, in materialistic language, sets forth the close of the day and the extinction of the light.  May we not construe the maiden as the Evening Twilight, the child of the Day at the close of its life?  The black lover with whom she is fatally enamored, is he not the Darkness, in which the twilight fades away?  The countless crowds of Toltecs that come to the wedding festivities, and are drowned before midnight in the waters of the strangely named river, are they not the infinitely numerous light-rays which are quenched in the world-stream, when the sun has sunk, and the gloaming is lost in the night?

May we not go farther, and in this Rock of Light which stands hard by the river, recognize the Heavenly Hill which rises beside the World Stream?  The bright light of one day cannot extend to the next.  The bridge is broken by the intervening night, and the rays are lost in the dark waters.

But whether this interpretation is too venturesome or not, we cannot deny the deep human interest in the story, and its poetic capacities.  The overmastering passion of love was evidently as present to the Indian mind as to that of the mediaeval Italian.  In New as well as in Old Spain it could break the barriers of rank and overcome the hesitations of maidenly modesty.  Love clouding the soul, as night obscures the day, is a figure of speech, used, I remember, by the most pathetic of Ireland’s modern bards:—­