For Otomie seemed such woman as men dream of but very rarely win, seeing that the world has few such natures and fewer nurseries where they can be reared.  At once pure and passionate, of royal blood and heart, rich natured and most womanly, yet brave as a man and beautiful as the night, with a mind athirst for knowledge and a spirit that no sorrows could avail to quell, ever changing in her outer moods, and yet most faithful and with the honour of a man, such was Otomie, Montezuma’s daughter, princess of the Otomie.  Was it wonderful then that I found her fair, or, when fate gave me her love, that at last I loved her in turn?  And yet there was that in her nature which should have held me back had I but known of it, for with all her charm, her beauty and her virtues, at heart she was still a savage, and strive as she would to hide it, at times her blood would master her.

But as I lay in the chamber of the palace of Chapoltepec, the tramp of the guards without my door reminded me that I had little now to do with love and other delights, I whose life hung from day to day upon a hair.  To-morrow the priests would decide my fate, and when the priests were judges, the prisoner might know the sentence before it was spoken.  I was a stranger and a white man, surely such a one would prove an offering more acceptable to the gods than that furnished by a thousand Indian hearts.  I had been snatched from the altars of Tobasco that I might grace the higher altars of Tenoctitlan, and that was all.  My fate would be to perish miserably far from my home, and in this world never to be heard of more.

Musing thus sadly at last I slept.  When I woke the sun was up.  Rising from my mat I went to the wood-barred window place and looked through.  The palace whence I gazed was placed on the crest of a rocky hill.  On one side this hill was bathed by the blue waters of Tezcuco, on the other, a mile or more away, rose the temple towers of Mexico.  Along the slopes of the hill, and in some directions for a mile from its base, grew huge cedar trees from the boughs of which hung a grey and ghostly-looking moss.  These trees are so large that the smallest of them is bigger than the best oak in this parish of Ditchingham, while the greatest measures twenty-two paces round the base.  Beyond and between these marvellous and ancient trees were the gardens of Montezuma, that with their strange and gorgeous flowers, their marble baths, their aviaries and wild beast dens, were, as I believe, the most wonderful in the whole world.*

‘At the least,’ I thought to myself, ’even if I must die, it is something to have seen this country of Anahuac, its king, its customs, and its people.’

* The gardens of Montezuma have been long destroyed, but some of the cedars still flourish at Chapoltepec, though the Spaniards cut down many.  One of them, which tradition says was a favourite tree of the great emperor’s, measures (according to a rough calculation the author of this book made upon the spot) about sixty feet round the bole.  It is strange to think that a few ancient conifers should alone survive of all the glories of Montezuma’s wealth and state.  —­Author.

CHAPTER XVI