University of Virginia Library

31. CHAPTER XXXI.

Meantime the reappearance of the barbarians
seemed to cut off the last hope of escape from Amador
and his companion; but the magician, answering the
cavalier's sullen look of despair with a laugh, and
pointing to the little star, which still made its way
up the cloudy arch along with the moon, said, dragging
him at the same time towards the artillery,

“What the spirits say, is true! All this said they,
of De Morla.—May he rest with God—Amen! Fear
not; be of good heart:—while the star shines, there
is hope,—and hope for both; for though I have not
yet read thy fate in full, still, while thou art at my side,
thou canst be in no great peril. At the worst, and
when the worst comes, it is written, that eagles shall
come down from heaven, and bear me away on their
backs.—Hast thou never a flint and dry tinder, to
light me a linstock? Here hath some knavish gunner
left his piece charged, and the grains of sulphur still
heaped up from rimbase to cascable. A good roar
now might do marvels.—Quick! they are upon us.—
Fling thee under the wheels, and look but as dead
as thou didst erewhile, till the cut-throats be passed.—
Hah! 'fore God, dost thou hear?” he exclaimed, suddenly
leaping up.—“Kalidon, soho, brave imp! and
thou shalt be a-galloping yet!—Hearest thou that
shout, like the clang of a bugle on a hill-top?—'Tis
Cortes! and he cometh!”

It was even as the magician had said. From the
moment that De Morla took the fatal leap, the rowers
ceased paddling in their canoes, as if certain of
his fate, or unwilling to follow so feeble a prey, and
remained huddled together, as though they awaited
the approach of a more tempting quarry. They had
not perceived the two companions. Just as Botello
was about to creep under a falconet, around whose
wheels the corses lay very thick, the strong voice of

Cortes was heard rising over the din, which, at some
quarter or other of the causeway, was kept up incessantly
during the whole conflict. It echoed again,
sustained and strengthened by the voices of a considerable
party.

“They approach!” said Botello. “They are a-horse
too; I hear the trampling. God quicken the rear!
Methought there were many who followed me.”

“Hark!” cried the cavalier. “The foul knaves
desert us! their voices are weaker; they fly again
to the land!”

“Here's that which shall fetch them back, if they
be men!” exclaimed Botello, catching up a port-fuse
not yet extinguished, striking it on his arm to shake
off the ashes, and whirling it in the air till it glowed
and almost blazed. “It will show them, there be
some living yet; and, with God's blessing, will scatter
yon ambushed heathen like plashing water-drops.
Ojala! and all ye fiends of air and water, of earth
and of hell, that are waiting for pagan souls, carry
my hail-shot true, and have at your prey!”

So saying, the conjurer applied the match. The
roar of the explosion was succeeded not only by the
yells of Mexicans, dying in their broken canoes, or
paddling away from so dangerous a vicinity, but by
Spanish shouts, both on the rear and in front.

“On, brave hearts!” cried Cortes; “there be bold
knaves yet at the ordnance!”

The next moment the little band of horse that
headed the relief, sprang into the lake, and swimming
aside, so as to avoid the sunken bodies, and the
bales still floating in the ditch, crossed over to the
cannon; while a large body of men, arranged with
such order, that they blocked up the whole causeway
from side to side, came marching up from the rear,
fighting as they fled, and still valiantly resisting the multitudes
that pursued both on the dike and in the water.

“Thanks be to God!” cried Don Hernan, rejoiced
that so many lived, and yet appalled at the numbers
and ferocious determination of the foes, who still,

like venomous insects following the persecuted herd,
pursued whithersoever the Christians fled. “Art
thou alive, De Leon?—Praised be St. James, who
listened to my prayer! Turn ye now, and let us succour
the rest.”

“They are in heaven,” said De Leon, with a faint
voice, for he was severely wounded, as indeed were
all his crew. “Push on, in the name of God, all who
can swim.—The others must perish.”

“Hold! stay!” exclaimed Cortes. “Fling the cannon
into the sluice.—Think not of the enemy. Heave
over my good falconets: they will make a bridge
for ye all.”

The wounded footmen seized upon the guns, with
the energy of despair; and flinging over the ropes to
that company of their fellow-infantry who had followed
Don Hernan, and now stood on the opposite
side, the pieces were pushed and dragged into the
water, and, together with the mass of corses already
deposited in that fatal chasm, made such a footing
for the infantry as enabled many to pass in safety.
Among these was Don Amador de Leste, his hand
grasped by the faithful magician, who perceived that
he was sunk into such sluggishness of despair, that
he must have perished, if left to himself.

It is not to be supposed that this passage was effected
without opposition and loss. On the contrary,
the barbarians redoubled their exertions; and while
many rested at a distance, shooting whole clouds
of arrows, others pushed their canoes boldly up to
the gap, and there slew many taken at such disadvantage.

Nevertheless, the passage was at last effected, and
the footmen, joining themselves to their fellows, and
forming, as before, twenty deep, followed the horsemen
towards the shore.

“Hold!” shouted Botello, when the party was
about to start. “Save your captain, ye knaves of the
rear!—Save De Leon! the valiant Velasquez!”

A few, roused by this cry, and heedless of the

shafts shot at them, rushed back to the brink, and
beheld the wounded and forgotten captain, in the
water, struggling in the arms of two brawny barbarians,
who strove to drag him into a canoe. While
his followers stood hesitating, not knowing how to
give him aid, the little vessel, agitated by his struggles,
which were tremendous, suddenly overset, and
captive and capturers fell together into the water.
The two warriors were presently seen swimming
towards a neighbouring canoe; and De Leon, strangling
under the flood, heaved not his last groan on the
gory block of sacrifice.

The fugitives paused not to lament; they resumed
their march, and gained the last ditch.

The events of that march, and of the passage of that
ditch, are, like the others, a series of horrors. Enough
has been narrated to picture out the dreadful punishment
of men who acknowledged no rights but those of
power, and preferred to rob a weak and childish race
with insult and murder, rather than to subdue them, as
could have been done, by the arts of peace. In the
sole incident which remains to be mentioned, we record
the fate of an individual whose influence had
been felt through most of the events of the invasion,
in many cases beneficially, but, in this, disastrously
enough. This was the enchanter, Botello,—a man
just shrewd enough to deceive himself; which is, in
other words, to say, that he mingled in his own person
so much cunning with so much credulity, that
the former was ever the victim of the latter. The
devoutness of his own belief in the efficacy of his
arts, was enough to secure them the respect and
reverence of the common herd, as well as of better
men, in an age of superstition. How much confidence
was given to them by Cortes, does not clearly
appear in the older historians; but it is plain, he
turned them to great advantage, and had the art
sometimes to make the stars, as well as Kalidon of
the Crystal, furnish revelations of his own hinting;
and, it is suspected, not without grounds, that this

very nocturnal flight, projected originally under the
impression that the barbarians would not go into
battle after night-fall, and, when the later events of
the siege had disproved this hope, still persisted in
from the persuasion that no Mexican would handle a
weapon on the day of an emperor's burial, was conceived
in the brain of the general before it was counselled
by the lips of Botello.

At all events, the enchanter did not, this night,
manifest any doubt in his own powers. With a
strange and yet natural inconsistency, he seemed to
rejoice over the slaughter of his countrymen, as over
the confirmation of his predictions. Twice or thrice,
at least, he muttered, and once even in the thick of
combat, to Don Amador, by whose side he ever walked,
at the head of the retreating party,—

“I said, this night we should retreat—we have retreated:
I said, there should be death for many, and
safety for some—the many are at rest, (God receive
their souls, and angels carry them to the seats of
bliss!)—and some of us are saved.”

“Be not over-quick in thy consummations,” said
Amador. “We are here now at the third ditch,
which is both wide and deep, and no bodies to bridge
it; and seest thou not how the yelling curs are paddling
in to oppose us?”

“Bodies enow!” cried the enchanter. “To-morrow,
at mid-day, when the sun is hottest, ye shall see
corses lying along on both sides of the causey, like
the corks of a fisherman's net; and at the ditches,
they will come up like ants out of the earth, when a
dead caterpillar falls at their door. Yet say I, we
shall be saved, and thou shalt see it; for I remember
how thou didst carve the back of that knave that lay
on me in the streets of Mexico; and I will carve a
dozen for thee in like manner, ere dawn, on this
causeway.”

“Boast no more: such confidence offends heaven;
for thy life hangs here as loosely as another's.”

“The star! the star!” cried Botello, “the dim little

star! is it not shining? The morning comes after it,
and the eagles are waking on the hills. They will
snuff the battle, they will shriek to the vultures, to the
crows, and the gallinazas, and down will they come
together to the lake-side and the lake. At eventide,
ye will see dead men floating about in the wind, and
on the breast of each a feeding raven; but devils shall
be perched on the corses of the heathen!”

“Heaven quit me of thy wild words, for they sound
to me unnatural and damnable, as though spoken by
one of those same demons thou thinkest of.—Speak no
more.—Look to thy life, for it is in jeopardy.”

“Hast thou not seen me in the battle? and, lo you
now, I have not a scratch!” said the enthusiast. “I
have fought on the dike, when there were twelve men
of us, good men, bold and true: eleven were slain,
but here am I untouched by flint, unbruised by stone,
unhurt by arrow. I fought three screeching infidels
in the water, hard by to where two valiant cavaliers
were pulled off their horses, and so smothered; and
yet strangled I my heathens, without horse to help,
or friend to say God speed me. The life that is
charmed is invulnerable; the star shines, the eagle
leaves her nest, and Kalidon-Sadabath laughs in the
crystal.—Viva! Lo now, how Sandoval, the valiant,
will scatter me yon imps in the boats! He spurs into
the water; Catalan the Left-handed, Juan of Salamanca,
Torpo the Growler, Ferdinand of Bilboa, and
De Olid the Devil's Ketch, they spring after him!—
There they go! Dance, Kalidon! thy brothers shall
have souls, to be fetched up from the mud as one
rakes up clams of a fish-day. Crowd hell with damned
heathens:—there be more to follow!”

Never before had such life possessed the spirits of
Botello. He stood on the edge of the causey, shouting
loud vivas, as the bold cavaliers rushed among
the canoes that blocked up the sluice. The novice,
though shocked at such untimely exultation, was not
able to avoid it; for he was enfeebled, and Botello
held him with a fast and determined gripe.

“Unhand me, conjurer,” he cried, “and I will swim
the ditch.”

“Tarry a little, till the path be made clear: thou
wilt be murdered else.”

“I shall be murdered, if I remain here; and so
wilt thou.—Hah! did that shaft hurt thee?”

“Never a jot; how could it? There flies not the
arrow this night, there waves not the bludgeon, that
can shed my blood.”

“Art thou besotted?—God forgive thee!—this is
impiety.”

The magician held his peace; for about this time,
the Mexicans, knowing that this band, diminished,
disordered, and divided by the ditch into two feeble
parties, was the sole remaining fragment of oppression,
and determined that no invader should escape
alive, rushed upon the causeway on all sides with such
savage violence as seemed irresistible. Those who
had not yet crossed, broke in affright, and flung themselves
into the sluice with such speed, that, in a few
moments, Don Amador began to think that he and
Botello were the only Christians left.

“Why dost thou hold me, madman?” he cried.
“Let me free.”

“Hark! dost thou not hear?—there are Christian
men behind us,” said Botello.—“Courage! What if
these devils be thicker than the thoughts of sin in
man's heart, fiercer than conscience, deadlier than
remorse; yet shall we pass them unharmed.—Patience!
'Tis the voice of a Spaniard, I tell thee, and
behind!”

“It is in front:—hark! 'tis Don Hernan!”

“It is behind, and it is the cry of Alvarado! Let
us return, and give him aid. Ho, ye that fly! return!
the Tonatiuh is shouting behind us: will ye desert
him?—Return, return!”

Before Amador could remonstrate, the lunatic, for
at this moment, more than any other, Botello seemed
to deserve the name, had dragged him to the top of
the dike, where he stood exposed to the view and the

shots of the foe. A thousand arrows were aimed at
the pair.

“Thou art a dead man!” said Amador.

“Dost thou not see the star?” cried the magician,
impatiently. “Not a bird hath yet flapped her wing,
not an eagle hath fled from her cliff; and my star,
my star”—

As he spoke, he let go his hold of the cavalier, to
point exultingly at the diminutive luminary. At that
very instant, an arrow, aimed close at hand, struck
the neophyte on the breast, entering the mail at a
place rent by blows of a previous day, and, without
wounding him, forced its way out through links hitherto
uninjured.

“Hah!” said the cavalier, as the arm of Botello
fell heavily on his shoulder.—“Art thou taught wisdom
and humility, at last? Let us descend, and
swim.”

As he moved, he became sensible that the shaft
was still sticking in his hauberk. He grasped the
feathered notch—the head was in the astrologer's
heart. The stout wood snapped, as Botello fell. It
struck him in the moment of his greatest hope. He
dropped down a dead man.

While Amador stood confounded and struck with
horror, he was seized, he knew not by whom, and
suddenly found himself dragged through the water.
Before he could well commend his soul to heaven,
for he thought himself in the hands of the enemy, he
beheld himself on firm land, while the voice of Cortes
shouted in his ear,—

“Rouse thee, and die not like a sleeper! Hold me
by the hand, and my good horse shall drag thee
through the melée—I would sooner that my arm
were hacked off than that thou shouldst sleep in the
accursed lake: enough of thy blood rests in it, with
Don Gabriel.”

“Ay,” thought the unhappy cavalier, “enough of
my blood, and all of my heart. Don Gabriel, De

Morla, Lazaro, Lorenzo, and—ay, and Leila! Better
that I were with them!”

A sudden cry from beyond the ditch interrupted
his griefs.

“Pause, pause!” cried the voice. “Leave me not!
—I am nigh!—I am Alvarado!”

The cavaliers looked back at these words, and beheld
a man come flying, as it were, through the air
over the ditch, perched on the top of a long Chinantlan
spear, the bottom of which was hidden in the
water. He fell quite clear of the sluice, after making
a leap which even his comrades, who had not individually
seen it, held impossible for mortal man, and
which, even to this day, has preserved to the spot the
name of the Salto, or leap, of Alvarado.

The appearance of the Tonatiuh was hailed with
shouts of joy; and the Spaniards, receiving it as a
good omen, closed their ranks, and slowly, for every
inch was contested, fought their way to the shore.
When they trode upon the firm ground, the little star
had vanished in the gray beams of morning; and a
thick mist rising up from the water like a curtain,
concealed from the eyes of the fugitives, along with
the accursed signal-fire, the fatal towers and temples
of Mexico.

Thus closed a night of horror and wo, memorable
as the Noche Triste, or Melancholy Night, of Mexican
history, and paralleled perhaps, in modern days,
if we consider the loss of the retreating army as
compared with its numbers, only by the famous and
most lamentable passage of the Berezina. More
than four thousand Tlascalans, and five hundred
Spaniards, were left dead on the causeway, or in the
lake. Of the prisoners, but two or three escaped;
two sons and as many daughters of Montezuma,
with five tributary kings, as well as many princes
and nobles, perished. All the cannon were utterly
lost, left to rust and rot in the salt flood that had so
often resounded to their roar; and of more than an
hundred proud war-steeds that champed the bit so

fiercely at midnight, scarce twenty jaded hacks snuffed
the breath of morning.

With this broken and lamenting force, with foes
still hanging on his rear, and ever flying from his
front, Cortes set out to seek a path, by new and unknown
mountains, to the distant Tlascala. He turned
his eyes but once towards the lake,—the pagan city
was hidden among the mists, and the shouts of victorious
Mexicans came but faintly to the ear. He
beat his breast, and shedding such tears as belong to
defeated hopes and the memory of the dead, resumed
his post at the head of the fugitives.