The Aztec Treasure-House | Page 2

Ph.D. (Leipsic), is given to the world.
Upon this work I say that I have been engaged for ten years. Rather
should I say that I have been engaged upon it for forty years; for its
germs were implanted in me when I was a child of but six years old.
Before my intelligence at all could grasp the meaning of what I read,
my imagination was fired by reading in the pages of Stephens of the
wonders which that eminent explorer discovered in Yucatan; and my
mind then was made up that I would follow in his footsteps, and in the
end go far beyond him, until I should reveal the whole history of the
marvellous race whose mighty works he found, but of whose genesis he

could only feebly surmise. And this resolve of the child became the
dominant purpose of the man. In my college life at Harvard, and in my
university life at Leipsic, my studies were directed chiefly to this end.
Especially did I devote myself to the acquisition of languages, and to
gaining a sound knowledge of the principles of those departments of
archæology and ethnology which related to the great work that I had in
view. Later, during the ten years that I occupied (as I believe usefully
and acceptably) the Chair of Topical Linguistics in the University of
Michigan, all the time that I properly could take from my professorial
duties was given exclusively to the study of the languages of the
indigenous races of Mexico, and to what little was to be found in books
concerning their social organization and mode of life, and to the broad
subject of Mexican antiquities. By correspondence I became acquainted
with the most eminent Mexican archæologists--the lamented Orozco y
Berra, Icazbalceta, Chavero, and the philologists Pimentel and Peñafiel;
and I had the honor to know personally the American archæologist
Bandelier, the surpassing scientific value of whose researches among
the primitive peoples of Mexico places his work above all praise. And
by the study of the writings of these great scholars, and of all writings
thereto cognate, my own knowledge steadily grew; until at last I felt
myself strong enough to begin the investigations on my own account
for which I had sought by all these years of patient preparation fittingly
to pave the way.
But inasmuch as my life until a short time since has been wholly that of
a scholar, and wholly has been passed in quiet ways, I truly have had
no teeth at all for the proper cracking of the nuts which have come to
me in the course of the surprising adventures that I have now set myself
to narrate. For in the course of these adventures (necessarily, yet sorely
against my will) I have been thrust by force of circumstances into many
imminent and prodigious perils; much time that I gladly would have
devoted to peaceful, fruitful study I have been compelled to employ in
rude and profitless (except that my life was saved by it) battling with
savages; and--what most of all has pained me--many curious and
interesting skulls that I gladly would have added entire to my collection
of crania, I have been driven in self-defence to ruin irreparably with my
own hands.

All of which diversities of my likings and my happenings will appear in
due order, as I tell in the following pages of the strange and wonderful
things which befell me--in company with Rayburn and Young and Fray
Antonio and the boy Pablo--in our search after and finding of the great
treasure that was hidden, in a curiously secret place among the Mexican
mountains more than a thousand years ago, by Chaltzantzin, the third
of the Aztec kings.

I.
FRAY ANTONIO.
My heart was light within me as I stood on the steamer's deck in the
cool gray of an October morning and saw out across the dark green sea
and the dusky, brownish stretch of coast country the snow-crowned
peak of Orizaba glinting in the first rays of the rising sun. And
presently, as the sun rose higher, all the tropic region of the coast and
the brown walls of Vera Cruz and of its outpost fort of San Juan de
Ulua were flooded with brilliant light--which sudden and glorious
outburst of radiant splendor seemed to me to be charged with a bright
promise of my own success.
And still lighter was my heart, a week later, when I found myself
established in the beautiful city of Morelia, and ready to begin actively
the work for which I had been preparing myself--at first unconsciously,
but for ten years past consciously and carefully--almost all my life
long.
Morelia, I had decided, was the best base for the operations that I was
about to undertake. My main