For a long time, as I slouched slowly eastward, I mused on those demeaning and disturbing realizations. For much of that time, I could only gloomily regard us Mexíca as the fruit of a tree rooted in swamp ooze and fed by human manure. But gradually I came to a new realization. People are not plants. They are not fixed to any roots or dependent on them. People are mobile and free to move far from their beginnings—far away, if that satisfies them—far upward, if they have the ambition and ability. The Mexíca had long been vain of their ancestry, and I had suddenly been made ashamed of it. But both attitudes were equally foolish: our ancestors merited neither blame nor credit that we were what we were.

We had aspired to something better than a swamp life, and we had achieved it. We had moved from the island of Aztlan to another island no more promising, and we had made of it the most resplendent city ever seen, the capital of a dominion unsurpassed, the center of a civilization ever broadening outward into lands that would still be mean and poor but for our influence. Whatever our origins or the forces that had impelled us, we had climbed to a height never reached by any other people. And we needed not to argue or explain or excuse our beginnings, our arduous journey through the generations, our arrival at the pinnacle we finally occupied. To command the respect of every other people, we needed to say only that we were the Mexíca!

I straightened my back and squared my shoulders and lifted my head and proudly faced in the direction of The Heart and Center of the One World.

* * *

But I found that I could not long maintain that firm and prideful stride. During all of that journey I had been retracing and unearthing and piecing together the past history of ancient lands and peoples. The nearer I got to home, the more it seemed that all that collected antiquity had permeated my mind, my muscles, and my bones. I felt that I was carrying every sheaf of the years gone by since history began, and I do not think I was simply imagining that burden. There was evidence that it really weighed on me. I walked more slowly and less erectly than I had used to do, and on breasting the higher hills I breathed hard, and when I labored up some very steep slopes my heart pounded on my ribs in angry complaint.

Because of my feeling that I had become weighted with all the ages of the world, I swerved aside as I approached Tenochtítlan. It was too modern for my mood. I decided to go first to an older place, a place I had never yet visited, though it lies not far to the east of where I was born. I wanted to see the place first inhabited in all this area, the site of the earliest civilization ever to flourish here. I circled around the lake basin—north, then southeastward, staying on the mainland—and I came at last to the ages-remembering city of Teotihuacan, The Place Where the Gods Gathered.

There is no knowing how many sheaves of sheaves of years it remembers in its dreaming silence. Teotihuacan is a ruin now, though a majestic ruin, and it has been a ruin during all the recorded history of all the peoples now living in this region. The pavement of its broad avenues was long ago buried under windblown silt and overgrowing weeds. Its ranks of temples are no more than rubble outlines of their former foundations. Its pyramids still tower over the plain, but their topmost points are blunted, their straight lines and sharp angles have softened and crumbled under the battering of years and weathers beyond reckoning. The colors with which the city would once have blazed are worn away—the radiance of its white lime gesso, the gleam of beaten gold, the brilliance of many different paints—and the whole city is now the drab dun and gray of its underlying rock construction. According to Mexíca tradition, the city was built by the gods, to be the place in which they convened while they made their plans for creating the rest of the world. Hence the name we gave it. But according to my old Lord Teacher of History, that legend is only a romantically mistaken notion; the city was actually built by men. Still, that would hardly lessen the wondrousness of it, for those men must have been the long-vanished Toltéca, and those Master Artisans built magnificently.

To see Teotihuacan as I first saw it—in an extravagantly colorful sunset, its pyramids looming up from the flatland and looking in that light as if newly sheathed in the richest red gold, luminous against the background of distant purple mountains and deep blue sky—that is a sight so overwhelming as to make one believe that the city was the work of the gods, or, if it was made by men, that they were a godlike race of men.

I entered the city at its northern end and picked my way through the litter of fallen stone blocks around the base of the pyramid that our Mexíca wise men supposed had been dedicated to the moon. That pyramid had lost at least a third of its height, where its top has been worn away, and its staircase ascends to a welter of loose rocks up there. The Pyramid of the Moon is surrounded by the standing or toppled columns and walls of buildings that must once have been two or three floors high. One edifice we called The Palace of the Butterflies, because of the abundance of those blithe creatures pictured in the murals still visible on its interior walls.

But I did not loiter there. I walked south along the city's central avenue, which is as long and broad as the floor of a good-sized valley, but much more level. We called it in Micaótli, The Avenue of the Dead, and, although it is thick with brush through which snakes slither and rabbits bounce, it still affords a pleasant stroll. More than a one-long-run in length, it is bordered by the ruins of temples on either side—until you are halfway along it. There the left-hand row of temples is interrupted for the unbelievably immense bulk of the icpac tlamanacali that our wise men had decided was The Pyramid of the Sun.

If I say that the whole city of Teotihuacan is impressive, but that The Pyramid of the Sun makes all the rest look trivial, perhaps that will give you some idea of its size and majesty. It is easily half again as big in every dimension as was the Great Pyramid of Tenochtítlan, and that was the grandest I had ever seen before. In fact, no one can say how big The Pyramid of the Sun really is, because much of its base is under the earth deposited there by wind and rain during the ages since Teotihuacan was abandoned. But what remains visible and measurable is awesome. At ground level, each of the four sides is two hundred and thirty paces from corner to corner, and the structure soars as high as twenty ordinary houses piled up on top of each other.

The pyramid's entire surface is rough and jagged, because the smooth slabs of slate with which it was once clad have all come loose from the jutting rock studs that held them. And long before those slates slid down to become a jumble of shards on the ground, I imagine they had already shed their original coating of white lime gesso and colored paints. The structure rises in four tiers, and each one slopes upward at a slightly different angle, for no reason except that that refinement of design deceives the eye and makes the entire edifice somehow appear even bigger than it is. So there are three wide terraces around the four sides and, at the very top, a square platform on which a temple must once have stood. But it would have had to be a very small temple, and quite inadequate for ceremonies of human sacrifice. The staircase ascending the pyramid's front is now so broken and crumbled that the individual steps are barely discernible.

The Pyramid of the Sun faces westward, toward the setting sun, and its front was still colored flame and gold when I reached it. But at that moment the lengthening shadows of the ruined temples on the other side of the avenue began to creep up the pyramid's front, like jagged teeth biting at it. I quickly began to scramble up what remained of the staircase, keeping in the jacinth sunlight all the way, just above and ahead of the encroaching shadow teeth.