“O compassionate God, the bed on which they lie down is not a thing to rest upon, but to endure torment in; they draw a rag over them at night, and so sleep; there they throw down their bodies, and the bodies of children that thou hast given them.  For the misery that they grow up in, for the filth of their food, for the lack of covering, their faces are yellow, and all their bodies of the color of earth.  They tremble with cold, and for leaness they stagger in walking.  They go weeping and sighing, and full of sadness, and all misfortunes are joined to them; though they stay by afire, they find little heat."[1]

The prayer continues in the same strain, supplicating God to give the people “some days of prosperity and tranquillity, so that they may sleep and know repose”; it concludes: 

“If thou answerest my petition it will be only of thy liberality and magnificence, for no one is worthy to receive thy bounty for any merit of his, but only through thy grace. Search below the dung-hills and in the mountains for thy servants, friends, and acquaintance, and raise them to riches and dignities.” . . .

“Where am I?  Lo, I speak with thee, O King; well do I know that I stand in an eminent place, and that I talk with one of great majesty, before whose presence flows a river through a chasm, a gulf sheer down of awful depth; this, also, is a slippery place, whence many precipitate themselves, for there shall not be found one without error before thy majesty.  I myself, a man of little understanding and lacking speech, dare to address

[1.  Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii, p. 204.]

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my words to thee; I put myself in peril of falling into the gorge and cavern of this river.  I, Lord, have come to take with my hands, blindness to mine eyes, rottenness and shriveling to my members, poverty and affliction to my body; for my meanness and rudeness this it is that I merit to receive.  Live and rule for ever in all quietness and tranquillity, O thou that art our lord, our shelter, our protector, most compassionate, most pitiful, invisible, impalpable.”

It is true that much of all this would apply to any great period of famine, but it appears that these events occurred when there was great cold in the country, when the people gathered around fires and could not get warm, a remarkable state of things in a country possessing as tropical a climate as Mexico.  Moreover, these people were wanderers, “going by mountain and wilderness,” seeking food, a whole nation of poverty-stricken, homeless, wandering paupers.  And when we recur to the part where the priest tells the Lord to seek his friends and servants in the mountains, “below the dung-hills,” and raise them to riches, it is difficult to understand it otherwise than as an allusion to those who had been buried under the falling slime, clay, and stones.  Even poor men do not dwell under dung-hills, nor are they usually buried under them, and it is very possible that in transmission from generation to generation the original meaning was lost sight of.  I should understand it to mean, “Go, O Lord, and search and bring back to life and comfort and wealth the millions thou hast slaughtered on the mountains, covering them with hills of slime and refuse.”