The Aztec Treasure-House Read online

  PROLOGUE.

  "God sends nuts to them who have no teeth:" which ancient Spanishproverb of contrariety comes strongly to mind as I set myself to thiswriting.

  By nature am I a studious, book-loving man, having a strong liking forquiet and orderliness. Yet in me also is a strain that urges me, evenalong ways which are both rough and dangerous, to get beyondbook-knowledge, and to examine for myself the abstractions of thoughtand the concretions of men and things out of the consideration whereofbooks are made. And I hold that it is because I have thus sought fortruth in its original sources, instead of resting content with whatpasses for truth, being detached fragments of fact which other men havefound and have cut and polished to suit themselves, that I have gatheredto myself more of it, and in its rude yet perfect native crystals, thanhas come into the possession of any other modern investigator. In makingwhich strong assertion I am not moved by idle vanity, but by a just andreasonable conception of the intrinsic merit of my own achievement: aswill be universally admitted when I publish the great work, now almostready for the press, upon which, in preparatory study and in convincingdiscovery, I have been for the past ten years engaged. For I speak wellwithin bounds when I declare that a complete revolution in all existingconceptions of American archaeology and ethnology will be wrought when_Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America_, byProfessor Thomas Palgrave, Ph.D. (Leipsic), is given to the world.

  Upon this work I say that I have been engaged for ten years. Rathershould I say that I have been engaged upon it for forty years; for itsgerms 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, myimagination was fired by reading in the pages of Stephens of the wonderswhich that eminent explorer discovered in Yucatan; and my mind then wasmade up that I would follow in his footsteps, and in the end go farbeyond him, until I should reveal the whole history of the marvellousrace whose mighty works he found, but of whose genesis he could onlyfeebly surmise. And this resolve of the child became the dominantpurpose of the man. In my college life at Harvard, and in my universitylife at Leipsic, my studies were directed chiefly to this end.Especially did I devote myself to the acquisition of languages, and togaining a sound knowledge of the principles of those departments ofarchaeology and ethnology which related to the great work that I had inview. Later, during the ten years that I occupied (as I believe usefullyand acceptably) the Chair of Topical Linguistics in the University ofMichigan, all the time that I properly could take from my professorialduties was given exclusively to the study of the languages of theindigenous races of Mexico, and to what little was to be found in booksconcerning their social organization and mode of life, and to the broadsubject of Mexican antiquities. By correspondence I became acquaintedwith the most eminent Mexican archaeologists--the lamented Orozco yBerra, Icazbalceta, Chavero, and the philologists Pimentel and Penafiel;and I had the honor to know personally the American archaeologistBandelier, the surpassing scientific value of whose researches among theprimitive peoples of Mexico places his work above all praise. And by thestudy of the writings of these great scholars, and of all writingsthereto cognate, my own knowledge steadily grew; until at last I feltmyself strong enough to begin the investigations on my own account forwhich I had sought by all these years of patient preparation fittinglyto pave the way.

  But inasmuch as my life until a short time since has been wholly that ofa scholar, and wholly has been passed in quiet ways, I truly have had noteeth at all for the proper cracking of the nuts which have come to mein the course of the surprising adventures that I have now set myself tonarrate. For in the course of these adventures (necessarily, yet sorelyagainst my will) I have been thrust by force of circumstances into manyimminent and prodigious perils; much time that I gladly would havedevoted to peaceful, fruitful study I have been compelled to employ inrude and profitless (except that my life was saved by it) battling withsavages; and--what most of all has pained me--many curious andinteresting skulls that I gladly would have added entire to mycollection of crania, I have been driven in self-defence to ruinirreparably with my own hands.

  All of which diversities of my likings and my happenings will appear indue order, as I tell in the following pages of the strange and wonderfulthings which befell me--in company with Rayburn and Young and FrayAntonio and the boy Pablo--in our search after and finding of the greattreasure that was hidden, in a curiously secret place among the Mexicanmountains more than a thousand years ago, by Chaltzantzin, the third ofthe Aztec kings.