Adam had flown out from England on New Year’s Day by the Qantas direct flight, touching down only at Bermuda and the Bahamas. Soon after one o’clock in the morning the aircraft had come in over Mexico City. Nearly six million people lived down there in the broad valley so, on any cloudless night, countless twinkling lights could be seen; but, as the Christmas decorations were still up, the great arena blazed like a velvet carpet heaped with strings, loops and plaques of precious jewels, making a never-to-be-forgotten sight.
Next morning he had slept late; then, after a breakfast-lunch up in his eighth-floor bedroom, he got out a map and through the plate-glass that formed the wall of one side of the room, he endeavoured to imagine the city as it had been in the days of the Aztec Empire.
That proved impossible. Then it had consisted of a large island in the middle of a great lake, to the shores of which it was connected by three long causeways. A copy of a drawing of it, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, that Adam had seen, showed the island to have been entirely built over with many fine plazas, palaces and pyramids. That was how Cortés and his men had seen it on their arrival and reception by the Emperor Moctezuma. They had marvelled at the beautifully carved stonework of the buildings, the scrupulously clean markets and the balconies of the houses gay with flowers.
Moctezuma’s intelligence service had been good. For years past he had been receiving reports of the Spaniards’ activities in the Caribbean; of their ships as big as houses, their cannon and muskets that could deal death from a distance by fire. He had endeavoured to persuade his formidable visitors to go away by making them presents of many beautiful gifts and much gold. The Spaniards were few in numbers and after eight months, disgusted by his cowardice in submitting to their blackmail, his people had revolted, stoned him to death and driven the Spaniards out. In la noche triste, as that terrible night was called, many of them had been so loaded down with gold that while trying to escape they had fallen from the causeways into the lake and had drowned.
But Cortés, with the survivors and a host of Indian allies hostile to the Aztecs, had returned. Their last Emperor, Cuauhtémoc, had led a most courageous resistance, but in vain. Then, in revenge for the Aztecs’ treachery, Cortés had razed the beautiful city of Tenochtitlán, as the capital was then named, to the ground. All that remained of it were many stones that the Spaniards had used when building a new and entirely different city.
An even greater change had been caused by the complete disappearance of the island. Late in the nineteenth century the great shallow lake had been drained, with the object of growing crops there. That had not proved possible because the marshland was strongly impregnated with salt; but ever-spreading suburbs had since been built on it, so that no trace remained of what had once been a tropical Venice set in the great fertile Anáhuac valley.
Yet, further afield, the scene was unchanged. On either side of the valley ranges of mountains, some with the sun shining on their snow-caps, dropped away into the misty distance. They were dominated by Popocatepetl, rising ten thousand feet above the city to seventeen thousand seven hundred feet.
Aeons ago Mexico had been split by a great rift running from Vera Cruz on the Atlantic to Cape Corrientes on the Pacific. The central plateau, on which Mexico City lay, had been heaved up and on both sides of it a belt erected eight hundred miles long by one hundred wide, dotted with innumerable volcanoes, many of which were still active. Once their lower slopes had been covered with dense forests of cedar; but, for building and fuel, the Spaniards had cut them down. The great ranges had since become a region of unbelievable harshness and desolation.
To the north of the rift lay many equally inhospitable areas of desert, and to the south of it, stretching away to Yucatán and Guatemala, vast tracts of low-lying land covered with jungle. Both could become unbearably hot and lack of roads rendered some parts so inaccessible that the Indians still lived in their villages in primitive conditions. So remote were they from law and order that if an aircraft had to make a forced landing in their neighbourhood they were still capable of murdering the passengers.
But during the past forty years enormous changes had taken place in Mexico. The land was incredibly poor and its agricultural value had been greatly reduced during the centuries by deforestation, which lessened the rainfall. Industrial development had attracted large numbers of the poverty-stricken peasants to the cities, many of which had quadrupled in size so that they now formed an extraordinary contrast to the barren lands scattered with miserable villages that surrounded them.
Mexico City itself was the exemple par excellence of this new age and when Adam went out that afternoon he was amazed by the grandeur of this modern metropolis.
Past his hotel ran the Paseo de la Reforma: a mile-long, six-lane highway that had been driven right through the centre of the city, with great skyscrapers of steel and glass rearing up on either side. Along it surged a flood of vehicles, the fast cars on its inner lanes speeding along at sixty miles an hour. In the side streets behind his hotel, where lay the best shopping district, there were jewellers, modistes, antiquiers and men’s shops that were evidence of the riches of the Mexican upper classes.
In the evening he went out again to see the illuminations. The Reforma, and all the other principal highways, had chains of coloured lights across them at frequent intervals and, every few hundred yards, big set-pieces of Father Christmas in his sleigh, the Seven Dwarfs, groups of angels and big baskets of flowers. Skyscrapers, with every window lit, reared up towards the stars and downtown, in the old part of the city, the Plaza de la Constitution was a sight never to be forgotten. In it stood the oldest Cathedral in the New World, the National Palace and the two City Halls. Every facet of these huge buildings was lit with concealed lighting, making the square as bright as day and very beautiful. Nothing that Paris or London had ever shown could approach the magnificence of these illuminations and nothing could have more greatly impressed Adam with the wealth of modern Mexico.
As he ate his late dinner in the roof restaurant of the Del Paseo he thumbed through a guide-book to make plans for the following day, and decided that Chapultepec Park had places in it that were the most likely to provide him with ideas for the basis of a new book.
The one-thousand-three-hundred-acre park lies at the western end of the city and the broad boulevard of the Reforma continues on for two miles between its flower gardens, natural woodlands, lakes and recreation grounds; but next morning Adam’s taxi turned off to mount the steep wooded hill on which stands Chapultepec Castle.
It had been built by one of the Spanish Viceroys in the eighteeneth century and now contains a museum of arms, pictures and furniture; but its main interest was that it had been the residence of the ill-fated Austrian Archduke Maximilian.
There were still many relics of Maximilian and his beautiful Empress, Carlotta, in the rooms they had occupied. Adam found them pathetic, and their furniture hideous, but he had already ruled out the idea of using this period as the background for a book because their tragic story was so well known.
That applied even more to Hernando Cortés; but in one of the larger halls a spacious modern mural by Diego Rivera greatly intrigued him. It portrayed all the rulers of Mexico, from the Conquest on; and, among them, Cortés was shown as a hideous, wasted, bandy-legged man with a head like a skull.
Turning to his guide, Adam asked why the firm-faced and virile Spanish hero should have been represented as such a hideous creature.
The fat little guide sniffed and replied, ‘To Mexicans he is no hero. He brought to our people much suffering, and he is so portrayed here because, when he died, he was riddled with syphilis.’
‘That is news to me,’ Adam remarked, ‘and I have read pretty widely about him. What grounds have you for believing that he was a syphilitic?’
The guide then told him that in 1823, when the heroes who fell in the War of Independence had been re-interred with honour in Mexico City, the priests had feared that the Indian mobs might desecrate Cortés’ grave; so they had removed his remains and secretly bricked them up in a wall of the chapel of the Hospital of Jesus, which Cortés had founded. Then in 1946 the finding of an old document had led to their discovery. Mexican anthropologists had examined the four-hundred-year-old bones and it was upon their assessment that Cortés was now said to have been a syphilitic monstrosity.
Adam would have given long odds that this was a vindictive libel arising from the intense hatred with which the Mexicans had come to regard the Conquistadores; for he knew that even Cortés’ enemies who had known him in his lifetime had written of him as a sombrely-handsome man, with a body that was capable of almost tireless endurance. The fact was that although, of course, the popular belief that he had conquered Mexico with five hundred Spaniards and sixteen horses was a myth.
The fact was that during his campaigns he had had many thousands of Indian allies. In 1519, when the Spaniards had landed at Vera Cruz, the Totonac caciques, who then ruled that part of Mexico, had received them with awe, then, when they had disclosed their intention of marching against the Aztec capital, willingly assisted them by supplying stores, porters and a great army of warriors.
There had been a very good reason for that. The Aztecs had appeared out of the north only two centuries earlier. Previous to that the Mayas and numerous other races who occupied different parts of the country had, from as early as 2000 B.C., built up spendid civilisations. They had achieved a high art: their engineers had constructed immense buildings and suspension bridges across the gorges in the mountains; their astronomers had produced a calendar that was more accurate than that then in use in Europe.
The Aztecs, on the other hand, had been fierce barbarians of an almost unbelievable cruelty. Having driven the inhabitants from the Central Plateau, they had established themselves on the island of Tenochtitlán then, from that fortress, sallied forth to conquer the whole of Mexico and turn its peoples into subject races. They waged war constantly, not alone for plunder but mainly to secure hordes of sacrificial victims with which to propitiate their blood-lusting god Huitzilopochtli. So it was no wonder that Cortés had found allies on all sides willing to aid him in destroying their Aztec overlords, and it was to his leadership that they owed their escape from this terrible tyranny.
The Conquest, on the other hand, brought many benefits to Mexico. Before that the diet available to the Indians was extraordinarily monotonous. Even the nobles had lived almost entirely on maize cakes, fruit and a little fish. Wheat, rice, barley, lentils, onions and potatoes were unknown, the latter having been brought from South America. They had no cattle, pigs or goats; so had no milk, butter or cheese, no grease with which to fry and, only occasionally, the meat of birds and small animals. They had no carts, horses or beasts of burden; so the only transport for articles of commerce consisted of porters trained to the exhausting work of bearing on their backs for many hours a day sacks weighing up to a hundred pounds suspended from bands across their foreheads. They were excellent weavers and dyers, but had not invented the button; so their main garment was a square piece of material with a hole in the middle through which they put their heads and, as it could not be done up, it dangled awkwardly about them, exposing their lower limbs to the cold. They had neither windmills nor watermills with which to grind their maize, so had to pound it laboriously in mortars. They had no iron or steel, so had patiently to chip pieces of obsidian to produce a sharp edge for all cutting implements and weapons. For tilling the earth they had no ploughs, so to sow their crops they had to use a stout pointed stick and make thousands of holes into each of which a single seed was dropped.
Through disease and, at times, brutality, the Indians had certainly endured much suffering under their conquerors; but the belief that their Spanish masters had used them worse than had the British, French or Dutch the peoples of the countries they had colonised Adam knew to be untrue; and he thought it regrettable that, since the Mexicans had gained independence, their politicians should have indoctrinated them with their hatred of the Spaniards, to whom their country owed so much.
When he had done the museum, with its State coaches, cannon and mementoes of Maximilian’s brief reign, his guide took him out on to the terrace of the Palace. Beneath, the wooded slope fell steeply, and above the tree-tops there was a fine view of the scores of lofty modern blocks that dotted the city. From among the trees in the near foreground there arose six smooth stone columns, about forty feet high with rounded tops.
His guide told him that at the time of the war between Mexico and the United States, which took place in 1846–8, the Castle had been a Military Academy. When the victorious American troops entered Mexico City they had demanded that the Mexican cadets should haul down their country’s flag. The cadets had refused, and six gallant youngsters had defended the Castle to the end, dying there rather than surrender. The war had been lost. It cost Mexico her vast northern territories. The United States established her claim to Texas and acquired California, in which gold was soon afterwards discovered; but nothing could ever rob Mexicans of their pride in the six heroic boys whose monument was these six tall stone columns.
Returning to the city, Adam again walked round the best shopping area, looking for a place to lunch, and, from the dozen or more restaurants, decided on the Chalet Suisse. He made an excellent meal off a dish of huge Pacific prawns, a Cassata ice and a carafe of the local wine.
Adam hated sleeping in the afternoon, as if he did he always woke up with a headache; but, in accordance with ancient Spanish custom, everything was shut during the siesta hours; so he spent them reading on his bed, then again took a taxi out to the Park, this time to the new Museum of Anthropology.
It proved another revelation to him of the wealth and enterprise of modern Mexico.
On three sides of the main hall there were spacious rooms with many exhibits of the numerous cultures of ancient Mexico, the earliest dating from a time when Hammurabi was ruling in Babylon: Otomic, Tepexpan, Huastec, Olmec, Maya, Chichimec, Toltec, Totonac, Mixtec, Tarascan, Zapotec and Aztec. All had individuality—there were the huge stone negroid heads of the Olmecs, crowned with helmets such as modern motor-cyclists wear; colossal columns representing Toltec warriors; slabs from temples carved by the Zapotecs with intricate geometrical designs; gold Mixtec necklaces of most delicate workmanship; images of Maya priests with flattened foreheads, great, curved noses and elaborate head-dresses; delightfully amusing Tarascan pottery figures; and big, wheel-like stones on which were carved the symbols of the Aztec calendar, the earlier cultures having contributed to the later ones. There were also papier-mâché models of ancient cities and, set in the walls, hundreds of coloured photographs lit from behind, showing archaeological sites.
Above these salons there was another range of rooms, demonstrating the life led in the Indian villages of the various nations. These contained figures of men, women and children, weaving, hunting, cooking, fishing, in open-sided huts and under groups of palm trees. There were arrays of bows and arrows, cases of coins and pigments, beautiful feather headdresses and cloaks of many colours. Then, in a basement building, entered from one side of the ground floor, there was an exact replica of the famous tomb at Palenque, with the skeleton of the High Priest lying in it and, in a separate case, the fabulous jade death-mask that had lain on his dead face for many hundreds of years.
Adam was enthralled. He spent four hours in the museum and could happily have remained there for several days. The Aztec exhibits meant little to him, but he recognised a number of items from the older cultures and found himself specially familiar with those of the Toltecs who had arisen about A.D. 200 and flourished until late in the tenth century. The latter was the period in Europe with which he was most familiar and he definitely made up his mind that he would set his novel in the Mexico of those days.
Before he left England, friends had warned Adam that the height of Mexico City might affect him, so he should be careful not to exert himself too much. But so far he had felt no ill-effects from the rarified air at seven thousand five hundred feet; so, as it was a nice evening, he decided to walk back to his hotel.
At intervals along the Paseo de la Reforma there are junctions each with a roundabout at which other streets enter it, several of them being the site of lofty statues. There is one to Columbus, another to Carlos IV—retained only because the Mexicans have an affection for El Caballito, his beautifully-modelled little horse—and a third to their national hero, the Emperor Cuauhtémoc. The westernmost of these great open spaces is at the entrance to the Park and has in its centre the Diana Cazadora Fountain. For strangers not yet familiar with Mexican traffic signals, these roundabouts are difficult to cross.
When stepping off the pavement towards the Fountain, Adam failed to look behind him, and a stream of traffic had just been released from that direction. The Mexicans are habitually fast drivers and, at the signal, three cars abreast shot forward. Too late, Adam realised his danger. The car heading for him had no room to swerve. He jumped towards the pavement, but the near mudguard of the car caught him on the thigh, bowling him over so that his head hit the kerb. Stars whirled before his eyes and next moment he was in another world.