The Aztec Treasure-House

Part 1

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THE AZTEC TREASURE-HOUSE

By Thomas Allibone Janvier

Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

TO C. A. J.

Departimiento y ha entre los enganos. Catales y ha que son buenos, e tales que malos, e buenos son aquellos que los omnes fazen a buena fe e a buena intencion.--ALONZO el SABIO, Setena Partida, Titulo xvi., Ley ii.

CONTENTS.

PROLOGUE

I. FRAY ANTONIO

II. THE CACIQUE'S SECRET

III. THE MONK'S MANUSCRIPT

IV. MONTEZUMA'S MESSENGER

V. THE ENGINEER AND THE LOST-FREIGHT MAN

VI. THE KING'S SYMBOL

VII. THE FIGHT IN THE CANON

VIII. AFTER THE FIGHT

IX. THE CAVE OF THE DEAD

X. THE SWINGING STATUE

XI. THE SUBMERGED CITY

XII. IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

XIII. UP THE CHAC-MOOL STAIR

XIV. THE HANGING CHAIN

XV. THE TEMPLE IN THE CLOUDS

XVI. AT THE BARRED PASS

XVII. OF OUR COMING INTO THE VALLY OF AZTLAN

XVIII. THE STRIKING OF A MATCH

XIX. THE SEEDS OF REVOLT

Part 2

XX. THE PRIEST CAPTAIN'S SUMMONS

XXI. THE WALLED CITY OF CULHUACON

XXII. THE OUTBREAK OF REVOLUTION

XXIII. A RESCUE

XXIV. THE AFFAIR AT THE WATER-GATE

XXV. THE GOLD-MINERS OF HUITZILAN

XXVI. THE GATHERING FOR WAR

XXVII. AN OFFER OF TERMS

XXVIII. THE SURRENDER OF A LIFE

XXIX. THE ASSAULT IN THE NIGHT

XXX. THE FALL OF THE CITADEL

XXXI. DEFEAT

XXXII. EL SABIO'S DEFIANCE

XXXIII. IN THE AZTEC TREASURE-HOUSE

XXXIV. A MARTYRDOM

XXXV. THE TREASURE-CHAMBER

XXXVI. THE VENGEANCE OF THE GODS

XXXVII. THROUGH DARKNESS TO LIGHT

XXXVIII. KING CHALTZANTZIN'S TREASURE

EPILOGUE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE DYING CACIQUE

THE LETTER FROM THE DEAD

PACKING IN THE CORRAL

THE FIGHT IN THE CANON

THE CAVE OF THE DEAD

AFLOAT ON THE LAKE

EL SABIO'S PREDICAMENT

Part 3

MAKING THE PEACE-SIGN

THE FULFILMENT OF THE PROPHECY

THE STRIKING OF A MATCH

CHECKING YOUNG'S OUTBREAK

THE LEAP FROM ABOVE THE WATER-GATE

THE TLAHUICOS AND THEIR GUARDS

IN THE GATE-WAY OF THE CITADEL

THE LAST RALLY

EL SABIO'S DEFIANCE

FRAY ANTONIO'S APPEAL

YOUNG'S STRUGGLE WITH THE PRIEST CAPTAIN

IN THE LIBRARY BEFORE THE OPEN FIRE

Who'd hear great marvels told-- Come listen now! Who longs for hidden gold-- Come listen now! Who joys in well-fought fights, Who yearns for wondrous sights, Who pants for strange delights-- Come listen now!

For here are marvels told To listen to! Here tales of hidden gold To listen to! Here gallant men wage fights, Here pass most wondrous sights, Here's that which ear delights To listen to!

THE AZTEC TREASURE-HOUSE

PROLOGUE.

"God sends nuts to them who have no teeth:" which ancient Spanish proverb of contrariety comes strongly to mind as I set myself to this writing.

By nature am I a studious, book-loving man, having a strong liking for quiet and orderliness. Yet in me also is a strain that urges me, even along ways which are both rough and dangerous, to get beyond book-knowledge, and to examine for myself the abstractions of thought and the concretions of men and things out of the consideration whereof books are made. And I hold that it is because I have thus sought for truth in its original sources, instead of resting content with what passes for truth, being detached fragments of fact which other men have found and have cut and polished to suit themselves, that I have gathered to myself more of it, and in its rude yet perfect native crystals, than has come into the possession of any other modern investigator. In making which strong assertion I am not moved by idle vanity, but by a just and reasonable conception of the intrinsic merit of my own achievement: as will be universally admitted when I publish the great work, now almost ready for the press, upon which, in preparatory study and in convincing discovery, I have been for the past ten years engaged. For I speak well within bounds when I declare that a complete revolution in all existing conceptions of American archaeology and ethnology will be wrought when Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America, by Professor Thomas Palgrave, Ph.D. (Leipsic), is given to the world.

Upon this work I say that I have been engaged for ten years. Rather should I say that I have been engaged upon it for forty years; for its germs were implanted in me when I was a child of but six years old. Before my intelligence at all could grasp the meaning of what I read, my imagination was fired by reading in the pages of Stephens of the wonders which that eminent explorer discovered in Yucatan; and my mind then was made up that I would follow in his footsteps, and in the end go far beyond him, until I should reveal the whole history of the marvellous race whose mighty works he found, but of whose genesis he could only feebly surmise. And this resolve of the child became the dominant purpose of the man. In my college life at Harvard, and in my university life at Leipsic, my studies were directed chiefly to this end. Especially did I devote myself to the acquisition of languages, and to gaining a sound knowledge of the principles of those departments of archaeology and ethnology which related to the great work that I had in view. Later, during the ten years that I occupied (as I believe usefully and acceptably) the Chair of Topical Linguistics in the University of Michigan, all the time that I properly could take from my professorial duties was given exclusively to the study of the languages of the indigenous races of Mexico, and to what little was to be found in books concerning their social organization and mode of life, and to the broad subject of Mexican antiquities. By correspondence I became acquainted with the most eminent Mexican archaeologists--the lamented Orozco y Berra, Icazbalceta, Chavero, and the philologists Pimentel and Penafiel; and I had the honor to know personally the American archaeologist Bandelier, the surpassing scientific value of whose researches among the primitive peoples of Mexico places his work above all praise. And by the study of the writings of these great scholars, and of all writings thereto cognate, my own knowledge steadily grew; until at last I felt myself strong enough to begin the investigations on my own account for which I had sought by all these years of patient preparation fittingly to pave the way.

But inasmuch as my life until a short time since has been wholly that of a scholar, and wholly has been passed in quiet ways, I truly have had no teeth at all for the proper cracking of the nuts which have come to me in the course of the surprising adventures that I have now set myself to narrate. For in the course of these adventures (necessarily, yet sorely against my will) I have been thrust by force of circumstances into many imminent and prodigious perils; much time that I gladly would have devoted to peaceful, fruitful study I have been compelled to employ in rude and profitless (except that my life was saved by it) battling with savages; and--what most of all has pained me--many curious and interesting skulls that I gladly would have added entire to my collection of crania, I have been driven in self-defence to ruin irreparably with my own hands.

All of which diversities of my likings and my happenings will appear in due order, as I tell in the following pages of the strange and wonderful things which befell me--in company with Rayburn and Young and Fray Antonio and the boy Pablo--in our search after and finding of the great treasure that was hidden, in a curiously secret place among the Mexican mountains more than a thousand years ago, by Chaltzantzin, the third of the Aztec kings.

FRAY ANTONIO.

My heart was light within me as I stood on the steamer's deck in the cool gray of an October morning and saw out across the dark green sea and the dusky, brownish stretch of coast country the snow-crowned peak of Orizaba glinting in the first rays of the rising sun. And presently, as the sun rose higher, all the tropic region of the coast and the brown walls of Vera Cruz and of its outpost fort of San Juan de Ulua were flooded with brilliant light--which sudden and glorious outburst of radiant splendor seemed to me to be charged with a bright promise of my own success.

And still lighter was my heart, a week later, when I found myself established in the beautiful city of Morelia, and ready to begin actively the work for which I had been preparing myself--at first unconsciously, but for ten years past consciously and carefully--almost all my life long.

Morelia, I had decided, was the best base for the operations that I was about to undertake. My main purpose was to search for the remnants of primitive civilization among the more isolated of the native Indian tribes; and out of the fragments thus found, pieced together with what more I could glean from the early ecclesiastical and civil records, to recreate, so far as this was possible, the fabric that was destroyed by the Spanish conquerors. Nowhere could my investigations be conducted to better advantage than in the State of Michoacan (of which State the city of Morelia is the capital) and in the adjacent State of Jalisco; for in this region tribes still exist which never have been reduced to more than nominal subjection, and which maintain to a great extent their primitive customs and their primitive faith, though curiously mingling with this latter many Christian observances. Indeed, the independence of the Indians of these parts is so notable that the proverb "Free as Jalisco" is current throughout Mexico. Moreover, Morelia is a city rich in ancient records. The archives of the Franciscan province, that has its centre here extend back to the year 1531; those of the Bishopric of Michoacan to the year 1538; and those of the Colegio de San Nicolas to the year 1540; while in the recently founded Museo Michoacano already has been collected a rich store of archaeological material. In a word, there was no place in all Mexico where my studies and my investigations could be pursued to such advantage as they could be pursued here.

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