"You speak Náhuatl," I said. He grunted and dropped the frog onto a pile of others in a lopsided basket of woven vines. Wondering if I had found a descendant of some stay-at-home ancestor of old Chief Juice, I asked, "Are you a Chichimecatl?" I would of course have been surprised if he had said he was, but what he did say was even more astounding:

"I am an Aztecatl." He leaned over the scummy pool again and slanted his spear and added, "And I am busy."

"And you have a most discourteous way of greeting a stranger," I said. His surliness dispelled whatever awe and stupefaction I might otherwise have been feeling at the discovery of an apparently actual, living, breathing remnant of the Aztéca.

"Courtesy would be wasted on any stranger so misguided as to come here," he growled, not even looking at me. The dirty water splashed as he skewered another frog. "Would any but a fool be visiting this stinking sink of the world?"

I remarked, "Any fool living in it has little cause to insult one who merely visits."

"You are right," he said indifferently, dropping the frog in his basket. "Why do you stand here being insulted by another fool? Go away."

I said tightly, "I have traveled for two years and thousands of one-long-runs, in search of a place called Aztlan. Perhaps you can tell me—"

"You have found it," he interrupted, in an uncaring voice.

"Here?" I exclaimed, in utter astonishment.

"Just yonder," he grunted, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, still not troubling to lift his eyes from his putrid frog pond. "Follow the path to the lagoon, then shout for a boat to take you across."

I turned away from him and looked, and there was a path leading off through the rank undergrowth, and I started along it, hardly daring to believe—

But then I remembered that I had not thanked the young man. I turned again and walked back to where he stood aiming his spear at the pond. "Thank you," I said, and I kicked his legs out from under him, so he fell with a mighty splash into the foul water. When his head broke the surface, festooned with slimy weeds, I dumped the basket of dead frogs onto him. Leaving him spluttering and cursing and clawing for a hold on the slippery bank, I turned yet again and walked toward The Place of the Snowy Egrets, the long-lost, the legendary Aztlan.

I do not really know what I expected or hoped to find. Perhaps an early, less elaborate version of Tenochtítlan? A city of pyramids and temples and towers, only not so modern of design? I do not really know. But what I did find was pitiful.

I followed the dry path winding through the marsh, and the trees around me grew farther and farther apart, the mud on either side of me became more wet and watery. At last the downward-dangling mangrove roots gave place to reeds growing upward through a sheet of water. There the path ended and I was standing on the shore of a lake stained blood-red by the setting sun. It was a great expanse of brackish water, but not a very deep one, to judge from the reeds and canes piercing its surface and the white egrets standing everywhere. Directly in front of me was an island, perhaps two arrow shots distant across the water, and I raised my crystal for a clear look at the place to which those egrets had given the name.

Aztlan was an island in a lake, as is Mexíco-Tenochtítlan, but there, it seemed, the resemblance ended. It was a low hump of dry land made not much higher by the city erected upon it, for there was not a building visible that was of more than one floor. There was not a single upthrusting pyramid, not even a temple tall enough to be seen. The island's sunset redness was overlaid with the blue smoke of evening hearth fires. From the lake around, numerous dugout canoes moved homeward toward the island, and I shouted to the nearest of them.

The man aboard was propelling it with a pole, the lake being too shallow to require the use of a paddle. He slid the canoe through the reeds to where I stood, then peered suspiciously at me and grunted a profanity and said, "You are not the—you are a stranger."

And you are another ill-bred Aztecatl, I thought, but did not say aloud. I stepped into the boat before he could move it away, and said, "If you came for the frog sticker, he claims to be busy, and I believe he is. You will please convey me to the island."

Except for a repetition of the profanity, he made no protest and evinced no curiosity and said not another word as he poled me across the water. He let me step ashore on the edge of the island, then went away—through one of what I then discovered were several canals cut through the island, its only other resemblance to Tenochtítlan. I strolled along the streets for a while. Besides a wide one circling the island's rim, there were only four others, two running the length of the island, two crossing it, all of them primitively paved with crushed oyster and clam shells. The houses and huts that crowded wall to wall along the streets and canals, though I suppose they had wooden frameworks, were plastered with a white surfacing also made of powdered shells.

The island was oval-shaped and quite large, about the size of Tenochtítlan without its northern district of Tlaltelólco. It probably had as many buildings too, but, since they were only of one level, they did not contain anything like the teeming population of Tenochtítlan. From the center of the island I could see the rest of the surrounding lake, and could see that the lake was also surrounded in all directions by the same feculent marsh through which I had come. The Aztéca at least were not so degraded as to live in that dismal swamp, but they might as well have done. The intervening lake waters did not prevent the swamp's night mists and miasmas and mosquitoes from invading the island. Aztlan was a thoroughly unwholesome habitat, and I was glad that my ancestors had had the good sense to abandon it.

I took the current inhabitants to be the descendants of those who had been too dull and listless to have left it in search of a better place to live. And, so far as I could tell, the descendants of the stay-behinds had not acquired any more initiative or enterprise in all the generations since. They seemed defeated and beaten down by their wretched surroundings, and resentful of them, but drearily resigned to them. The people on the streets gave me a glance of knowing me for a newcomer, and a newcomer certainly must have been a rarity there, but not one of them commented to another on my presence. Not one gave me greeting, or kindly inquired if I was as hungry as I doubtless looked, or even sneered at me for an unwelcome intruder.

The night came on, and the streets began to empty of people, and the darkness was relieved only by the fitful gleams of hearth fires and coconut-oil lamps leaking out from the houses. I had seen enough of the city, and in any case could then see very little, which meant I was likely at any moment to walk off the verge of a canal. So I intercepted a latecomer trying to hurry by me unnoticed, and asked him where I could find the palace of the city's Revered Speaker.

"Palace?" he repeated vacantly. "Revered Speaker?"

I should have known that anything like a palace would be inconceivable to those hut dwellers. And I should have remembered that no Revered Speaker of the Aztéca had adopted that title until long after they had become the Mexíca. I amended my question:

"I seek your ruler. Where does he reside?"

"Ah, the Tlatocapili," said the man, and Tlatocapili means nothing more eminent than a tribal chief, like the leader of any barbarian desert rabble. The man gave me hurried directions, then said, "Now I am late for my meal," and vanished in the night. For a people marooned in the middle of nowhere, with so little of anything to occupy them, they seemed foolishly fond of pretending urgency and activity.