The crew are ten in number; the captain, eight men, and an old woman in charge of the tortillas and the pulque-jar.  All these are brown people; in fact, the navigation of the lakes is entirely in the hands of the Indians, and “reasonable people” have nothing to do with it.  Reasonable people—­“gente de razon”—­being, as I have said before, those who have any white blood in them; and republican institutions have not in the least effaced the distinction.

So it comes to pass that the canoe-traffic is carried on in much the same way as it was in Montezuma’s time.  There is one curious difference, however.  These canoes are all poled about the lakes and canals; and I do not think we saw an Indian oar or paddle in the whole valley of Mexico.  In the ancient picture-writings, however, the Indians are paddling their canoes with a kind of oar, shaped at the end like one of our fire-shovels.  But, as we have seen, the distribution of land and water has altered since those days; and the lakes, far greater in extent, were of course several feet deeper all over the present beds; and even at a short distance from the city poling would have been impossible.  I suspect that the Aztecs originally used both poles and paddles, and that the latter went out of use when the water became shallow enough for the pole to serve all purposes.  Otherwise, we must suppose that the Mexicans, since the Spanish Conquest, introduced a new invention; which is not easy to believe.

We had first to get out of the canal, and fairly out into the lake.  This was the more desirable, as the canal is one of the drains of the city, an office that it fills badly enough, seeing that there is scarcely any fall of water from the lower quarters of the city to the lake.  I never saw water-snakes in numbers to compare with those in the canal, and by the side of it.  They were swimming in the water, wriggling in and out; and on the banks they were writhing in heaps, like our passengers forward.  Two of our crew tow us along, and we are soon clear of the canal, and of the salt-swamp that extends on both sides of it, where the bottom of the lake was in old times.  Once fairly out, we look round us.  We see Mexico from a new point of view, and begin to understand why the Spaniards called it the Venice of the New World.  Even now, though the lake is so much smaller than it was then, the city, with its domes and battlemented roofs, seems to rise from the water itself, for the intervening flat is soon foreshortened into nothing.  At the present moment it is evident that the level of the lake is much higher than usual.  A little way off, on our right, is the Penon de los Banos—­“the rock of baths”—­a porphyritic hill forced up by volcanic agency, where there are hot springs.  It is generally possible to reach this hill by land, but the water is now so high that the rock has become an island as it used to be.