Heavily beset from the rear, and by thousands of men in canoes, they found that the weight of their transport had jammed the bridge which could not be removed. They filled the second gap with rocks, with their artillery and transport, with chests of gold, horses, and dead men. So they came to the third gap, no longer an army but as a flying mob of Spaniards and Tlascalan warriors bewildered in the rain and the darkness by the headlong desperation of the attacking host. They were compelled to swim, and at least fifty of the recruits were drowned by the weight of gold they refused to leave, while many were captured to be sacrificed upon the Aztec altars. Montezuma’s children were drowned, and hundreds more, while Cortes and his cavaliers, swimming their horses back and forth convoyed the column, and Alvarado with his rear guard held the causeway. Last in the retreat, grounding his spear butt, he leaped the chasm, a feat of daring which has given a name forever to this place as Alvarado’s Leap. And just beyond, upon the mainland there is an ancient tree beneath which Cortes, as the dawn broke out, sat on the ground and cried. He had lost four hundred fifty Spaniards, and thousands of Tlascalans, his records, artillery, muskets, stores and treasure in that lost battle of the Dreadful Night. A week later the starved and wounded force was beset by an army of two hundred thousand Aztecs. They had only their swords now, but, after long hours of fighting, Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, so by his matchless valor and leadership gaining a victory. The rest is a tale of horror beyond telling, for, rested and reinforced, the Spaniards went back. They invested, besieged, stormed and burned the famine-stricken, pestilence-ridden capital, a city choked and heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant nation. Afterward, under the Spanish viceroys, Mexico was extended and enlarged to the edge of Alaska, a Christian civilized state renowned for mighty works of engineering, the splendor of her architecture, and for such inventions as the national pawn-shop, as a bank to help the poor. One of the so-called native “slaves” of the mines once wrote to the king of Spain, begging his majesty to visit Mexico and offering to make a royal road for him, paving the two hundred fifty miles from Vera Cruz to the capital with ingots of pure silver as a gift to Spain. VII A. D. 1532 THE CONQUEST OF PERU Pizarro was reared for a swineherd; long years of soldiering made him no more than a captain, and when at the age of fifty he turned explorer, he discovered nothing but failure.