The great jubilee festival, which was celebrated every fifty-two years throughout the empire, marked the coincidence of four times thirteen solar and four times thirteen lunar years. This the Mexicans called a 'sheaf of years,' and when the first day of the fifty-third year dawned, the ceremony of _Toxilmolpilia_, or 'the binding-up of years,' was held. Priests and people gazed feverishly at the Pleiades to see if they would pass the zenith. Should they do so the world would hold on its course for another similar period; if not, extinction would instantly follow. Fire was kindled upon a victim's breast by the friction of wood, and whenever it was alight the prisoner's heart was plucked out, and along with his body was consumed upon a pile of wood kindled by the new fire. As the flames ascended, and it was seen that the Pleiades had crossed the zenith, cries of joy burst from the assembled people below. Faggots were lighted at the sacred pyre, and domestic fires rekindled from them. Humanity had been respited for a generation. It is difficult to believe that a people so imbrued in a religion of bloodshed could have been punctilious in matters of morality, and it is still more difficult to believe the evidence of Sahagun and Clavigero concerning their personal piety. It seems certain, however, that as a race the Aztecs were austerely moral, pious, truth-loving, and loyal as citizens, and even the sanguinary priests do not appear to have reaped any benefit from their terrible offices. All the evidence would seem to show that it was the belief in the existence of cruel and insatiable gods which rendered the priests and people alike callous and insensible to the taking of human life, and this is the more easily understood when it is remembered that the Aztecs had at a comparatively late period emerged from a state of migratory savagery into the heirship of an ancient and complex civilisation.[5] CHAPTER IV THE RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT PERUVIANS