It but remains for me now to present my readers with a few specimens of Aztec literature, translated from the hieroglyphics now mouldering amid the forests of Chiapa; to narrate the history of my escape from the Living City of the aborigines; to bespeak a friendly word for the forthcoming history of one of the earliest, most beautiful, and unfortunate of the Aztec queens, copied _verbatim_ from the annals of her race, and to bid them one and all, for the present, a respectful adieu. Before copying from the blurred and water-soaked manuscript before me, a single extract from the literary remains of the monumental race amongst whom I have spent three years and a half of my early manhood, it may not be deemed improper to remark that a large work upon this subject is now in course of publication, containing the minutest details of the domestic life, public institutions, language, and laws of that interesting people. The extracts I present to the reader may be relied upon as exactly correct, since they are taken from the memoranda made upon the spot. Directly in front of the throne, in the great audience-chamber described in the preceding chapter, and written in the most beautiful hieroglyphic extant, I found the following account of the origin of the land: The Great Spirit, whose emblem is the sun, held the water-drops out of which the world was made, in the hollow of his hand. He breathed a tone, and they rounded into the great globe, and started forth on the errand of counting up the years. Nothing existed but water and the great fishes of the sea. One eternity passed. The Great Spirit sent a solid star, round and beautiful, but dead and no longer burning, and plunged it into the depths of the oceans. Then the winds were born, and the rains began to fall. The animals next sprang into existence. They came up from the star-dust like wheat and maize. The round star floated upon the waters, and became the dry land; and the land was high, and its edges steep. It was circular, like a plate, and all connected together. The marriage of the land and the sea produced man, but his spirit came from the beams of the sun. Another eternity passed away, and the earth became too full of people. They were all white, because the star fell into the cold seas, and the sun could not darken their complexions. Then the sea bubbled up in the middle of the land, and the country of the Aztecs floated off to the west. Wherever the star cracked open, there the waters rose up and made the deep sea. When the east and the west come together again, they will fit like a garment that has been torn.