[309] “Hecho de una peña un leon de mas de dos brazas de largo con sus alas y plumas: estaba hechado y mirando á la parte del oriente, en cuia boca asomaba un rostro, que era el mismo retrato del Rey.” Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 42. [310] Bullock speaks of a beautiful basin, twelve feet long by eight wide, having a well five feet by four deep in the centre, etc., etc. Whether truth lies in the bottom of this well is not so clear. Latrobe describes the baths as “two singular basins, perhaps two feet and a half in diameter, not large enough for any monarch bigger than Oberon to take a duck in.” (Comp. Six Months in Mexico, chap. 26; and Rambler in Mexico, Let. 7.) Ward speaks much to the same purpose (Mexico in 1827 (London, 1828), vol. ii. p. 296), which agrees with verbal accounts I have received of the same spot.{*} {*} [Mayer, “Mexico as it Was and Is,” gives a picture of this “bath,” p. 234.--M.] [311] “Gradas hechas de la misma peña tan bien gravadas y lizas que parecian espejos.” (Ixtlilxochitl, MS., ubi supra.) The travellers just cited notice the beautiful polish still visible in the porphyry. [312] Padilla saw entire pieces of cedar among the ruins, ninety feet long and four in diameter. Some of the massive portals, he observed, were made of a single stone. (Hist. de Santiago, lib. 11, cap. 81.) Peter Martyr notices an enormous wooden beam, used in the construction of the palaces of Tezcuco, which was one hundred and twenty feet long by eight feet in diameter! The accounts of this and similar huge pieces of timber were so astonishing, he adds, that he could not have received them except on the most unexceptionable testimony. De Orbe Novo, dec. 5, cap. 10.{*} {*} [Those who have seen the giant Sequoias of California can easily believe in those “enormous wooden beams.” The “Grizzly Giant,” still standing in the Mariposa grove, is two hundred and seventy-five feet high and considerably more than thirty feet in diameter at the ground. Eleven feet from the ground it is more than sixty-four feet in circumference. The Sequoias were not discovered until almost ten years after Prescott wrote this note.--M.] [313] It is much to be regretted that the Mexican government should not take a deeper interest in the Indian antiquities. What might not be effected by a few hands drawn from the idle garrisons of some of the neighboring towns and employed in excavating this ground, “the Mount Palatine” of Mexico! But, unhappily, the age of violence has been succeeded by one of apathy.