Mitla; A Narrative of Incidents and Personal Adventures on a Journey in Mexico, Guatemala, and Salvador in the Years 1853 to 1855. with Observations on the Modes of Life in Those Countries. Edited by J. S. Bell (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858 edition. Excerpt: ...standing at an equal distance from one another, along the centre of the hall. They seem to have supported the roof, are of granite, each of one massive piece, and have neither pedestal, capital, nor architrave; their height is about twelve feet, their diameter about four feet at the base, from which it diminishes. To this hall adjoins a projecting part of the building, that looks towards the mountains in an opposite direction from the central court-yard. In it, there are four apartments; three lesser ones, and a big one in the centre. One of the small ones still bears a flat roof of stone. The other three buildings of this group are merely small heaps of ruins, excepting one that has yet a window and two stone pillars standing erect. 254 INDIAN RELIGION INFLUENCED BY FEAR. chap. VI. The alcalde soon returned to his house and left us to our own meditations. A swarm of pretty little Indian girls arrived soon after his departure, all offering little idols of clay or sandstone for sale. Each family in that village possesses a little store of these commodities, which they sell to travellers for coppers. These little idols are generally but flat heads, and are said to have served as ornaments of the interior walls of the ruins we contemplated, on which they had been fastened with cement. All the faces were, of course, true types of the spirit of all Indian religion, .--awful, terrible, and hideous countenances, calculated to influence their worshippers with fear; the only feeling an Indian acknowledges as the fit worship of genuine power. If all individuals, communities, and governments, that have to deal with Indians, Eastern as well as Western, were but to understand and act on this basis of the character of the savage, how many mistakes, disastrous..