There was nearly a riot in the army, marooned in an unknown and unfriendly land.  Cortes made another speech.  He pointed out the fact that if they were successful in the expedition to the capital they would not need the ships; if they were not, what good would the ships do them when they were seventy leagues inland?  Those who dared not take the risk with him could still return to Cuba in the one ship that was left.  “They can tell there,” he added in a tone which cut the deeper for being so very quiet, “how they deserted their commander and their friends, and patiently wait until we return with the spoils of the Aztecs.”

An instant of breathless silence followed, then somebody shouted.  A hundred voices took up the cry,—­

“To Mexico!  To Mexico!”

Of the adventures, the fighting, the wonderful sights and the narrow escapes of the march to the capital, Bernal Diaz, who was with the army, wrote afterward in bulky volumes.  On the seventh day of November, 1519, the compact little force of Spaniards, little more than a battalion in all, with their Indian allies from the provinces which had rebelled against the Emperor, came in sight of the capital.  The moment at which Cortes, at the head of his followers, rode into the city of Mexico is one of the most dramatic in all history.  Nothing in any novel of adventure compares with it in amazing contrast or tragic possibilities.  The men of the Age of Cannon met the men of the Age of Stone.  The mighty Catholic Church confronted a nation of snake-worshiping cannibals.  The sons of a race that lived in hardy simplicity, a race of fighters, had come into a capital where life was more luxurious than it was in Seville, Paris or Rome—­a heathen capital rich in beauty, wealth and all the arts of a barbarian people.

The city had been built on an island in the middle of a salt lake, reached by three causeways of masonry four or five miles long and twenty or thirty feet wide.  At the end near the city each causeway had a wooden drawbridge.  There were paved streets and water-ways.  The houses, built around large court-yards, were of red stone, sometimes covered with white stucco.  The roofs were encircled with battlements and defended with towers.  Often they were gardens of growing flowers.  In the center of the city was the temple enclosure, surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall.  Within this were a score of teocallis, or pyramids flattened at the top, the largest, that of the war-god, being about a hundred feet high.  Stone stairs wound four times around the pyramid, so that religious processions appeared and disappeared on their way to the top.  On the summit was a block of jasper, rounded at top, the altar of human sacrifice.  Near by were the shrines and altars of the gods.  Outside the temple enclosure was a huge altar, or embankment, called the tzompantli, one hundred and fifty-four feet long, upon which the skulls of innumerable victims were arranged.  The doorways and walls everywhere were carved with