So Ahuítzotl shouted, "Drop the trough gate!" and several Arrow Knights leapt forward to the parapet. They seized the wooden panel designed to shut off the water's flow, and slid it down into the trough's slots. But, for all their combined strength and weight, the knights could push the panel only so far. As soon as its curved lower edge went into the water, the powerful current tilted it in the slot and jammed it at that point. For a moment there was silence on the causeway, except for the water's swoosh and gurgle, the sighing and hooting of the east wind, the creaking of the beleaguered wooden fort, and the muted hubbub of the fast-departing crowd at the island end. Looking at last defeated, with all his plumes drenched and drooping, the Revered Speaker said, loudly enough for us all to hear:

"We must go back to the city and see what damage has been done, and do what we can to allay the panic. Arrow and Jaguar Knights, come with us. You will commandeer all the acaltin on the island and row immediately to Coyohuacan. Those fools yonder are probably still celebrating. Do whatever you can to stop or divert the water at its source. Eagle Knights, stay here." He pointed to where the aqueduct joined the causeway. "Break it. There. Now!"

There was some confusion as the several designated groups disentangled. Then Ahuítzotl, his wives and his retinue, the priests and nobles, the Arrow and Jaguar Knights—all were slogging toward Tenochtítlan, as swiftly as they could with the nearly thigh-deep water dragging at them. We Eagle Knights stood contemplating the heavy stone and stout mortar of the trough. Two or three knights struck at the stone with their maquahuime, making the rest of us dodge the flying splinters of broken obsidian. Those knights looked disgustedly at their ruined swords and threw them into the lake.

Then one elderly knight went some way down the causeway to peer over its parapet. He called to us, "How many of you can swim?" and most of us raised our hands. He pointed and said, "Right here, where the aqueduct swerves, the force of the water's changing direction is making the pilings tremble. Perhaps, if we can chop at them, we could weaken them enough that the structure will quake itself apart."

And that is what we did. I and eight other knights struggled out of our clammy and bedraggled uniforms, while unbroken maquahuime were found for us, then we dove over the parapet into the lake on that side. As I have said, the waters west of the causeway were in those days nowhere very deep. If we had had to swim, the chopping would have been impossible, but the rising water was yet only shoulder-high at that spot. Even so, it was no trifling job. Those tree-trunk supports had been impregnated with chapopotli to resist decay, and that made them resistant to our blades as well. The night had come and gone, and the sun was up, when one of the massive pilings jerked and gave an explosive crack! I was underwater at that moment and the concussion nearly stunned me, but I surfaced to hear one of my fellow knights shouting for us all to climb back to the causeway.

We got there just in time. That part of the aqueduct which angled off from the causeway was quivering violently. With a grinding noise, it broke at the bend in it. Flinging water in all directions, that loose end of the structure shook like the warning tail of a coacuechtli snake. Then a section some ten paces long slewed to one side, as the pilings we had chopped gave way under it, and broke loose with a groan and toppled with a mighty splash. The jagged end of the trough out there was still cascading water into the lake, but it was pouring no more into Tenochtítlan. Even as we stood there, the water already on the causeway began to ebb.

"Let us return home," one of my brother knights sighed, "and hope we have saved some homes to return to."

Home. Let me put off for a little while the telling of my homecoming.

The water that had poured into Tenochtítlan for the better part of a day and a whole night had inundated parts of the city as deep as the height of a man. Some houses built low, and not of stone, had crumbled in that flood; and even some houses built high had been toppled from their supports; and many people had been injured; and about twenty—mostly children—had been drowned or crushed or otherwise lost. But the damage and casualties had been limited to those parts of the city where the branch channels and storage basins had overflowed, and that water had drained away into the canals soon after we Eagle Knights severed the aqueduct.

However, before the litter of that lesser inundation could be cleared away, the second and greater flood came. We had only broken the aqueduct, not stoppered it, and the other knights whom Ahuítzotl had sent to the mainland were unable to stanch the spring there. It continued to gush its waters into the part of the lake contained and confined between our western and southern causeways. Meanwhile, the wind continued to blow from the east, preventing the excess water from draining out into the big Lake Texcóco through the causeway passages and the canals crossing our city. So the canals filled and brimmed and overflowed, and the water rose over the island, and Tenochtítlan became a great cluster of many buildings poking up not from an island but from an unbroken sheet of water.

Immediately upon his return from the aborted dedication ceremony, Ahuítzotl sent a boatman to Texcóco, and Nezahualpili came immediately in response to the call for help. He had a force of workmen rushed straight to the unquenchable Coyohuacan spring and, as all had hoped, he did devise a means of pinching off the flow. I have never visited the site, but I know it is on a hillside, and I gather that Nezahualpili commanded the digging of a system of trenches and earthworks which diverted part of the spring's effluence over the far side of the hill where it could run harmlessly into empty land. Once that was accomplished, and the spring tamed, and the flood all dissipated, the aqueduct could be repaired and put back into use. Nezahualpili designed gates that would, as required by the city's needs, let much or little of the spring's water down the aqueduct. And so, to this day, we still drink those sweet waters.

But Nezahualpili's salvage operation was no overnight accomplishment. While he and his workmen labored, that second flood stood at its crest for four entire days. Though few or no people perished in it, at least two-thirds of the city was destroyed, and the rebuilding of Tenochtítlan took some four years to complete. The flood would not have caused so much damage if the water had merely covered our streets and lain quietly there. Instead, it surged back and forth, moved one way by the force impelling it to seek a uniform level, moved the other way by the malicious east wind. Most of Tenochtítlan's buildings were held above street level by pilings or some other kind of foundation, but that was only to lift them above the ground's dampness. Their foundations had never been intended to withstand the battering currents they then endured—and most of them did not stand. Adobe houses simply dissolved in the water. Stone houses, small and large, fell when their underpinnings were gnawed away, and they broke into the blocks of which they were built.

My own house stood unharmed, probably because it was rather newer built, hence stronger than most others. In The Heart of the One World the pyramids and temples also remained standing; only the comparatively fragile skull rack came down. But just outside the plaza, one entire palace collapsed—the newest and most magnificent of all—the palace of the Uey-Tlatoani Ahuítzotl. I have told how it straddled one of the city's main canals, so that the passing public might admire its interior. When, like all the other canals, that one overflowed, it first filled the ground floor of the palace and then bulged the lower walls outward, at which the whole great edifice came thundering down.