"Aztec" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Aztec lands, Sphinx-like, the tawny herdsman stands, A coiled riata in his hands. Devoid of hope, devoid of fear, Half brigand, and half cavalier— This helot, with imperial grace, Wears ever on his tawny face A sad, defiant look of pain. Left by the fierce iconoclast, A ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... one of a hundred pictures he had seen of just such curiosities—like the junk which clutters the windows of curio dealers. The figure sat cross-legged with its heavy hands folded in its lap. The face was flat and coarse, the lips thick, the nose squat and ugly. Its carved headdress was of an Aztec pattern. The cheek-bones were high, and the chin thick and receding. The girl pressed close to his side as he held the thing in his lap with an odd mixture of interest ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... nothing in the civilization of the most advanced American races worth preserving, except their monuments. The destruction of the Aztec and Peruvian empires was, on the whole, an advantage to humanity. The darkest period of religious persecution in Europe saw nothing to compare with the sanguinary rites of Aztec worship, and bigoted, intolerant and oppressive as the Spaniards were they ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... for the Race-Week. Poses Plastiques in the Grand Assembly Room up the Stable-Yard at seven and nine each evening, for the Race-Week. Grand Alliance Circus in the field beyond the bridge, for the Race-Week. Grand Exhibition of Aztec Lilliputians, important to all who want to be horrified cheap, for the Race-Week. Lodgings, grand and not grand, but all at grand prices, ranging from ten pounds to twenty, for the ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... fight, with every drop of her sluggish but fierce Indian blood aroused and burning in her veins, she sprang to her feet, and but for Tobalito's strong, restraining grasp, she would have gone to Pepe's aid and died wildly striking by Pepe's side—as the Aztec women, her brave ancestors, fought and died on the causeways of Anahuac when the cruel Spaniards first came into the land. But Tobalito held her fast—and then a merciful unconsciousness came to give her ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... San Francisco, at Cincinnati and St. Louis, and it has been the result of my last conjecture that the seat of power of North America would yet be found in the Valley of Mexico,—that the glories of the Aztec capital would be renewed, and that city would become ultimately the capital of the United States of America. But I have corrected that view, and I now believe that the last seat of power on this great continent will be found somewhere within a radius of not very far from the very spot where I ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... is still in the future, and in the future the decision rests. In the mean time we prepare. If may be we shall have such a start that we shall prevent him growing. You know, because he was better skilled in chemistry, knew how to manufacture gunpowder, that the Spaniard destroyed the Aztec. May not we, who are possessing ourselves of the world and its resources, and gathering to ourselves all its knowledge, may not we nip the Slav ere he grows a thatch ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... suspect the outlandish word of American Indian origin! How right the insect was, in testifying, in its own fashion, that the precious bean came to us from the New World! While still retaining its original name—or something sufficiently like it—the bean of Montezuma, the Aztec ayacot, has migrated from Mexico ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, it is not the mere possession of wealth that is so sought, but those joys of which our mistaken imaginings make gold the symbol. In the central composition here pictured, the Gilded One has vanished through the portals. Impersonal, unresponsive attendants in Aztec garb guard the door from suppliant followers. With subtle symbolism they give no sign as to whether or not they will relent and give entrance. But the fact that branches of trees have grown close across the opening seems to imply that ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... Like the Aztec Emperors of ancient Mexico, who took a solemn oath to make the Sun pursue his wonted journey, I too have vowed to corroborate and help sustain the Solar System; vowed that by no vexed thoughts of mine, no attenuating doubts, nor incredulity, nor malicious ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... and beautiful towns. The city itself is rapidly becoming a handsome one, indeed an imperial one. Accommodation for visitors, however, leaves much to be desired. The country's history is of course absorbingly interesting, and the many remains of Aztec and older origin appeal much to one's curiosity. There is a capital golf-course, a great bull-ring, and a pelota court. There is much wealth, and every evening a fine display of carriages and horses. The little dogs called Perros Chinos of Mexico, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec, with arrested brain-growth, as being of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Spartan oligarchs and Athenian democrats, Roman patricians and Roman plebeians, Venetian senators and Florentine ciompi, Norman nobles and Saxon serfs, Russian boyars and Turkish spahis, Spanish hidalgos and Aztec soldiers, Carolina slaveholders and New England farmers,—these and a hundred other races or orders have all been parties to the great, the universal struggle which has for its object the acquisition of property, the providing of a shield against ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... identical with Ruskin's teaching that life without effort is crime; and since the males are useless as workers or fighters, their existence is of only momentary importance. They are not, indeed, sacrificed,—like the Aztec victim chosen for the festival of Tezcatlipoca, and allowed a honeymoon of twenty days before his heart was torn out. But they are scarcely less unfortunate in their high fortune. Imagine youths brought up in the knowledge that they are ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... the great glass cabinet, whence thousands of little dogs looked at him out of little black dots of eyes. There were dogs of all nationalities, all breeds, all twisted enormities of human invention. There were monstrous dogs of China and Japan; Aztec dogs; dogs in Sevres and Dresden and Chelsea; sixpenny dogs from Austria and Switzerland; everything in the way of a little dog that man had made. He stood in front of it with almost a doggish snarl on his lips. He had spent hundreds and hundreds ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... Notwithstanding Prescott's very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico. His method, as he outlined it, would have been the natural one. Instead of partially satisfying the reader's curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the Aztec civilization was exposed, Irving would have begun with the entry of the conquerors, and carried his reader step by step onward, letting him share all the excitement and surprise of discovery which the invaders ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... "Weatherbee told me how it could be traced back through a Spanish mother to some buccaneering adventurer, Don Silva de y somebody, who made his headquarters in Mexico. And that means a trace of Mexican in the race, or at least Aztec." ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... celebrated as being the place where several Americans were slaughtered by the Mexicans during the revolution, in which Governor Bent lost his life, heretofore spoken of. On the plain which is contiguous with the south bank of the Arroya Hondo, there are to be found the remains of a large Aztec town, which was, at some remote period, the largest settlement inhabited by that interesting people to be found in northern New Mexico. At the present day, can be seen the size and almost the number of houses which formed ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... machine, easily portable by a man on foot, fed from a small gasoline tank. From Central Texas on down into Central America prickly pear acts as host for the infinitesimal insect called cochineal, which supplied the famous dyes of Aztec civilization. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... to frighten, it became larger and larger in form, and more formidable in sound. In this respect it only kept pace with the drum, for we read of Assyrian and Thibetan trumpets two or three yards long, and of the Aztec war drum which reached the enormous height of ten feet, and ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... the influence of a common religion, common language, and common government, knit together as one nation, animated by a spirit of love for its institutions and devoted loyalty to its sovereign. What a contrast to the condition of the Aztec monarchy, on the neighboring continent, which, composed of the like heterogeneous materials, without any internal principle of cohesion, was only held together by the stern pressure, from without, of physical force !—Why the Peruvian monarchy should have fared no better than its rival, in its ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... and Christianity see Bohlen's Altes Indien, I. 334 (Weber, Indische Skizzen, p. 92). At a recent meeting of the British Association E.B. Tylor presented a paper in which is made an attempt to show Buddhistic influence on pre-Columbian culture in America. On comparing the Aztec picture-writing account of the journey of the soul after death with Buddhistic eschatology, he is forced to the conclusion that there was direct transmission from Buddhism. We require more proof than Aztec pictures of hell ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... a lot of fishing-tackle, and bought a hunting-knife with a nickel-plated handle. It was a beaut, and stood me three fifty. A fellow can never be too careful. Up there you are likely any minute to come face to face with an Apache or some old left-over Aztec ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... the Aztec names are shortened in many instances out of consideration for the patience of the reader; thus 'Popocatapetl' becomes 'Popo,' 'Huitzelcoatl' becomes 'Huitzel,' &c. The prayer in Chapter xxvi. is freely rendered ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... line, the Hopi say, are symbols of the whirlpool, and it is interesting to find in the beautiful plates of Chavero's Antigueedades Mexicanas that the water in the lagoon surrounding the ancient Aztec capital was indicated by the Nahuatl Indians with ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... things, stow the soldiers and civilians and animals in their nests of drawers, burn the trees again—this time they are sweet-bay; and all the joys and sorrows and rivalries and successes of Blue End and Red End will pass, and follow Carthage and Nineveh, the empire of Aztec and Roman, the arts of Etruria and the palaces of Crete, and the plannings and contrivings of innumerable myriads of children, into the limbo of games exhausted ... it may be, leaving some profit, in thoughts widened, in strengthened apprehensions; ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... adventure in Virginia and the Spanish Main. A Kentish boy is trepanned and carried off to sea, and finds his fill of adventure among Indians and buccaneers. The central episode of the book is a quest for the sacred Aztec temple. The swift drama of the narrative, and the poetry and imagination of the style, make the book in the highest sense literature. It should appeal not only to all lovers of good writing, but to all who care for the record ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... "An Aztec Cacique that I saved from an evil death. He is one of the few I can trust. And here another!" said he, as the door opened and a great blackamoor Centered, bearing a roast with wine, etc., at sight whereof my mouth watered and I ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more—the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed /jacal/ near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken dream from drinking /mescal/. Back of the /jacal/ a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... man sat in a room of a stone house in the ancient City of Mexico, capital in turn of Aztec, Spaniard and Mexican. They could see through the narrow windows masses of low buildings and tile roofs, and beyond, the swelling shape of great mountains, standing clear against the blue sky. But they ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... new world here sought, is stranger far than his, who stretched his vans from Palos. It is the world of mind; wherein the wanderer may gaze round, with more of wonder than Balboa's band roving through the golden Aztec glades. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Peru, from every romantic bit of the wonderful countries south of us— blocks of porphyry with quaint grecques and hieroglyphic painting from Mitla, copper axes and pottery from Cuzco, sculptured stones and mosaics, jugs, cups, vases, little gods and great, sacrificial stones, a treasure house of Aztec and Inca lore—enough to keep one occupied for hours merely to ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... since abandoned, but the Four Peaks still stand, wrapped in their black shadows by night, and their purple colors by day, waiting for the passing of the Apache and the coming of the white man, who shall dig his canals in those arid plains, and build his cities upon the ruins of the ancient Aztec dwellings. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... fellows at command. And then it was that I fell in with that arch-devil, that master rogue whose deeds had long been a terror throughout the Main, a fellow more bloody than any Spaniard, more treacherous than any Portugal, and more cruel than any Indian—Inca, Mosquito, Maya or Aztec, and this man an Englishman, and one of birth and breeding, who hid his identity under the name of Bartlemy. I met him first in Tortuga where we o' the Brotherhood lay, six stout ships and nigh four hundred men convened for an expedition against Santa Catalina, and this for two reasons, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... ancient times the advance guard of Teutonic migration crossed the Rhenish border of Gaul, selected choice sites here and there, after the manner of Ariovistus, and appeared as enclaves in the encompassing Gallic population. While the Anahuac plateau of Mexico formed the center of the Aztec or Nahuatl group of Indians, outlying colonies of this stock occurred among the Maya people of the Tehuantepec region, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... we return later. The myths of the origin of things may be studied without a knowledge of the whole Aztec Pantheon. Our authorities, though numerous, lack complete originality and are occasionally confused. We have first the Aztec monuments and hieroglyphic scrolls, for the most part undeciphered. These merely attest the hideous and cruel ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... less speculation regarding the origin of pueblo culture is the usual and perhaps proper accompaniment of nearly all treatises bearing on that subject. Early writers on the Aztec culture, aided by a vague tradition of that tribe that they came from the north, pushed the point of emigration farther and farther and still farther north, until finally the pueblo country was ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... admiration. There was another contrast that had at this time an influence on my heart's inclinings. To an eye, fatigued with dwelling long and continuously on the dark complexions of the south—the olivine hue of Aztec and Iberian skins—there was a relief in the radiance of this carmined blonde, that, apart from her absolute loveliness, was piquant from the novelty and rareness of the characteristic. Additional elements of attraction may have been: the mise en scene that ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... force, strengthened by Indian allies and by ships which he built on the lakes, Cortes, in May, 1521, began the siege of Mexico, as historians call the Aztec capital. Guatemotzin, the last of the Aztec emperors, made a desperate defence, and before its capture the city was almost destroyed. On August 12th the Spaniards made a strong assault, which so weakened the defenders that the following ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... deep, deep brown; Her hair was darker than her eye; And something in her smile and frown, Curled crimson lip and instep high, Showed that there ran in each blue vein, Mixed with the milder Aztec strain, The vigorous vintage of Old Spain. She was alive in every limb With feeling, to the finger tips; And when the sun is like a fire, And sky one shining, soft sapphire One does not drink ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... openly. In some of their villages, it is said, the estafa, or sacred fire, is kept burning, and has never been permitted to go out since the time of Montezuma, from whom and his people they believe themselves descended. They are undoubtedly of Aztec race, and sun-worshippers, as were the subjects of the unfortunate Emperor ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... Aztec sacrifice!" cried the professor; and they all laughed. "One would hardly have anticipated," he resumed after a pause, addressing Trednoke, "that you would have made a double conquest,—first of the men, and ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... man sitting on the ground. What do you make of all this, as, especially privileged, you peep over the shoulder of 'Hualpilli the 'tzin, in the portico of his porphyry baths? Nothing, of course. But to the dusky king, skilled in the reading of Aztec hieroglyphics, the message from his Council is plain enough. And this is what he reads: "Most dread and mighty lord, the sun of the world! This is to inform you that the noble young cacique, Ixtlil', at the head of forty of his wild boy-followers is raiding the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... Beech and elm and pine and cedar, Laurel, holly, ash and maple— All the trees have bent their growing To the husbandman's caprices. All the beasts have fled to westward; All the reptiles skulk in hiding; All the rivers and the brooklets Have subdued their wild, free rolling. Ancient mounds and Aztec relics, Mural signs and hieroglyphics, Toltec remnants and weird mummies, All the arts and queer devices Of a prehistoric people, Have entombed their sylvan phantoms, In an everlasting Lethe. Now the woods and plains are surveys, Of distinctive tracts and precincts, Now the ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... famous in Mexican history as Casas Matas, and and is the scene of the famous plan, or revolution, of Feb. 2, 1823, by virtue of which a republican form of government may be said to exist in Mexico. It lies westward of Chapultepec, the old palace of the Aztec kings, and from the nature of its position, and the careful manner in which it was fortified, was a position of great strength. It lay at the foot of a rapid declivity, enfiladed by the fire of Chapultepec, and so situated, that not a shot could ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... incongruity there was between his lively Latin extravagance and Miss Mannersley's Puritan precision and intellectual superiority. They had gone to Mexico; Mrs. Saltillo, as was known, having an interest in Aztec antiquities, and he being utterly submissive to her wishes. For myself from my knowledge of Enriquez's nature, I had grave doubts of his entire subjugation, although I knew the prevailing opinion was that Mrs. Saltillo's superiority would ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... grass and the country was not cut up with ravines and gullies as it is now. This has been brought about through over-stocking the ranges. On the Little Colorado we could cut hay for miles and miles in every direction. The Aztec Cattle Company brought tens of thousands of cattle into the country, claimed every other section, overstocked the range and fed out all the grass. Then the water, not being held back, followed the cattle trails and cut the country up. Later, tens of thousands of cattle ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... as we passed out, the Aztec Calendar,—a round stone covered with hieroglyphics, which is still preserved and fastened on the outside of the cathedral. We afterwards saw the Stone of Sacrifices, now in the courtyard of the university, with a hollow in the middle, in which the victim was laid, while ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... peculiar to his own country, which was in ours misconstrued into a desire for physical nourishment. His repetition of the word "goo-goo,"—which was subject to a variety of opposite interpretations,—when taken in conjunction with his size, in my mind seemed to indicate his aboriginal or Aztec origin. ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... grass-grown street, and were again on the prairie, when a shot rang out behind us, the bullet cutting up the dust away to the left. "By G—— he's on the shoot," cried our friend; "ride, boys!" and so we rode. Much has been written and said of cities old and new, of Aztec and Peruvian monuments, but I venture to offer to the attention of the future historian of America this sample of the busted up city of Kearney and its solitary indweller, who had snakes in his boots ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... obviously discovered it long before him. There had been intercourse of old, too, between Asia and the Western Continent; the elephant-headed god of Mexico, the debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, the singular coincidences between India and Peru, all seem to show that a stream of communication, however faint, once existed between the Asiatic and American worlds. Garcilaso himself, the half-Indian historian of Peru, says that the banana was well known in his native country ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... he is a pure-blooded Aztec. His friends claim for him that he has the virtues of an Indian—courage, patience, endurance, and dignified reserve. His enemies, on the other hand, profess to see in him some of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele. He came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an Aztec—a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father's millions as though they had never been. He possessed a fortune in his ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... history of the dwellers in Anahuac, to make known the annals of the rise and fall of Tlascala, Otumba, Copan, or Papantla. In the great work of Lord Kingsborough are collected many important remains of Mexican and Aztec art and learning; Mr. Prescott has combined with a masterly hand the traditions of the country; and Mr. Stevens and Mr. Squier have done much in the last few years to render us familiar with the more accessible and probably most significant ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... yet she must live on; when he saw her adopting a system of things whose influence would shrivel up instead of developing her faculties, crush her imagination with such a mountain-weight as was never piled above Titan, and dwarf the whole divine woman within her to the size and condition of an Aztec—even then was he able to reason with himself: "She belongs to God, not to me; and God loves her better than ever I could love her. If she should set out with her blind guide, it will be but a first day's journey ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... almost paralyzed with astonishment when he saw that the vessel was sealed and that it bore on its side, instead of the conventional Aztec design, this inscription in black: ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... Hawkshaw, the sole survivor of the good ship Swan, which had sailed from a Devon port to challenge the mercantile supremacy of the Spaniards in the New World. He is beset by many perils among the natives, but is saved by his own judgment and strength, and by the devotion of an Aztec princess. At last by a ruse he obtains the protection of the Spaniards, and after the fall of Mexico he succeeds in regaining his native shore, with a fortune ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... of Montezuma, the Aztec priests had engrafted upon these simple ceremonies not only a burdensome ceremonial, and a polytheism similar to that of Eastern nations, but, as we have seen, human sacrifices and even cannibalism had become prominent features in religious worship. Throughout ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... balls by clapping their straw hats over the mouths of the guns, could not stand their ground. Hidalgo was captured and shot, but he was succeeded by Jose Maria Morelos, also a priest. Reviving the old Aztec name for central Mexico, he summoned a "Congress of Anahuac," which in 1813 asserted that dependence on the throne of Spain was "forever broken and dissolved." Abler and more humane than Hidalgo, he set up a revolutionary government that the authorities of ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... commensurate contents to show for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical feeling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the impression. I thought with envy of the Aztec children, of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm. Plotinus was less ashamed of his whole body than I of this inconsiderate and stupid appendage. To ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... in Eden" of the Pentateuch, the land of Tulan or Tlapallan in Aztec myth, the islands of the Hesperides, the rose garden of Feridun, and a score of other legends attest with what strong yearning man seeks in the past the picture of that perfect felicity which the present ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the fruit of the tree Persea gratissima, which grows in the West Indies and elsewhere; the flesh is of a soft and buttery consistency and highly esteemed. The name avocado, the Spanish for "advocate," is a sound-substitute for the Aztec ahuacatl; it is also corrupted into "alligator-pear." Avocato, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... long been pictured in our country's story as occurring amid the shadows of that dreadful midnight upon the banks of the Ocatahoola, when vengeful Frenchmen put them to the sword. Whence they came, whether from fabled Atlantis, or the extinct Aztec empire of the South, no living tongue can tell; whither fled their remnant,—if remnant there was left to flee,—and what proved its ultimate fate, no previous pen has written. Out from the darkness of the unknown, scarcely more than spectral ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... sunflowers mark the once broad trail to the quaint Aztec city, and silence reigns in the beautiful valley, save when broken by the passage of "The Flyer" of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway, as it struggles up the heavy grade of the Glorieta Mountains a mile ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... below, and that it was lost in the great water that was without limit and had no end. These Indians, according to their traditions, had once inhabited, as a mighty nation, the country extending from near the city of Mexico to the Rio Grande, and were subjects of the Aztec empire of Mexico. They had been persecuted and oppressed, and determined, in grand council, to abandon the country and seek a home beyond the Mizezibbee, or ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Compare the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another—the constellation of the Pleiades ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the fierce struggle of Chicago. The occasion was innocent enough and stupid enough,—a lecture at the Carsons' by one of the innumerable lecturers to the polite world that infest large cities. The Pre-Aztec Remains in Mexico, Sommers surmised, were but a subterfuge; this lecture was merely one of the signs that the Carsons had arrived at a certain stage ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... sign, of "good luck to you "—the most ancient symbol of the human race of which there is any record. Professor Wilson's work gives some four hundred illustrations of this curious sign as found in the Aztec mounds of Mexico, the pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of Troy, and the ancient lore of India and China. One might almost say there is a curious affinity between the Greek cross and Swastika! If, however, ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... many melodies of the Laureate, nor his versatile mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not the microscopic glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, which tears the life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the very heart from the victim. We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold's poetry has our love; his lines murmur in our memory through all the stress and accidents of life. "The Scholar Gipsy," "Obermann," "Switzerland," the melancholy majesty of the close of "Sohrab and Rustum," ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... might be seen together in corners earnestly discussing, not the question whether Servia should have an outlet on the Adriatic, or the possibilities of a British success in international polo contests, but the more absorbing topic of the problematic Aztec or Nilotic origin ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... of the Aztec (or native Mexican) emperors, was born about 1480. He was taken prisoner by Hernando Cortes, the commander of the Spanish army which conquered Mexico, and, in the hope of quelling an insurrection which had ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... began. Certainly it was the first region where civilization reached any height. When Columbus was discovering America great cities flourished in the Fire Country—cities of untold wealth and beauty, now fallen into ruins like the great cities of our own Aztec and Inca civilizations. ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... associated with motion picture theatres, where concourses of circus riders in impossible regalia performed impossible feats of horsemanship in the unravelling of impossible plots. She had never thought of them as real—or, if she had, it was as a vanished race, like the Aztec ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... Leonard Mackall. Their son, General William W. Mackall, was a graduate of West Point in the class with General Grant. He served with distinction in the Mexican War and later in the Confederate Army. Shortly after the close of the Civil War, General Grant gave a reception at the White House to the Aztec Society, composed of officers who served in the War with Mexico and their descendants. General Mackall went to it clad in his grey uniform and was most cordially received by his ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... more classical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes. In the Welsh portion of "Madoc" the historical background is carefully studied from Giraldus Cambrensis, Evans' "Specimens," the "Triads of Bardism," the "Cambrian Biography," and similar sources, and in the Aztec portion, from old Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Mexico and the journals of modern travellers in America. In "The Earthly Paradise" nothing is historical except the encounter with Edward III.'s fleet in the channel. Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and strangeness of romance. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... were to the witty son of Witless, Mexico and her politics are to moderns, not even excepting the predestined devourers of the Aztec land, who ought to know something of the country they purpose bringing within the full light of civilization through the aid of slaughter and slavery. There are some myriads of "Americans of the North" yet living, and who entertain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... any other of the human race. Their population is most dense along the districts nearest to Asia; and among the Mexicans, whose records of the past deserve credence, there is a constant tradition that their Aztec and Toultec chiefs came from the northwest. Every where but to the north, America is surrounded with a vast ocean unbroken by any chain of islands that could connect it with the Old World. Most probably no living man ever crossed this immense barrier ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... said in a whisper. "I am the guardian of the treasure of Montezuma. It is to be used to free Mexico from the Spaniard. He must be driven out. The land belongs to the Aztec." ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... course, I must not move, and am in a rancid box here, feeling the heat a great deal, and pretty tired of things. Alexander did a good thing of me at last; it looks like a mixture of an aztec idol, a lion, an Indian Rajah, and a woman; and certainly represents a mighty comic figure. F. and Lloyd both think it is the best thing that has been done of ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pahu carries one back in imagination to the dread sacrificial drum of the Aztec teocallis and the wild kettles of the Tartar hordes. The drum has cruel and bloody associations. When listening to its tones one can hardly put away a thought of the many times they have been used to drown the screams of some ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say. I imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that. There's a church here—a Methodist or some other kind—with a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to Christianity. He and me don't assimilate except on state occasions. I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet. But ...
— Options • O. Henry
... a true political warrior, and his battle for human rights compares with the Oligarchist battle against them as the warfare of Cortes compares with Aztec warfare. He is the man full of strong thought backed by civilization: they, the men trying to keep up their faith in idols, trying to scare with war-paint, trying to startle with war-whoop, trying to vex with showers of poor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... bronze knife, and his hair and nails when cut had to be buried under a lucky tree. [315] The Frankish kings were never allowed to crop their hair; from their childhood upwards they had to keep it unshorn. The hair of the Aztec priests hung down to their hams so that the weight of it became very troublesome; for they might never crop it so long as they lived, or at least till they had been relieved from their office on the score of old age. [316] In the Male Paharia tribe from ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... attention and allegiance of the race by an appeal to the religious instinct; that all men naturally seek God, and long to know Him. But if we try to define the religious instinct, we shall find it a hard task. What might be called a religious instinct leads to human sacrifice upon the Aztec altar; directs the Hindu to cast the new-born child in the stream, the friend to sacrifice his best ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... fury of the tempest. Those nearest the dike, running their canoes alongside, with a force that shattered them to pieces, leaped on the land, and grappled with the Christians, until both came rolling down the side of the causeway together. But the Aztec fell among his friends, while his antagonist was borne away in triumph to the sacrifice. The struggle was long and deadly. The Mexicans were recognized by their white cotton tunics, which showed faint through the darkness. Above the combatants rose a wild and discordant ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... reverence the rattlesnake as grandfather and king of snakes who is able to give fair winds or cause tempest. Among the Hopi (Moqui) of Arizona the serpent figures largely in one of the dances. The rattlesnake was worshipped in the Natchez temple of the sun; and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl was a serpent-god. The tribes of Peru are said to have adored great snakes in the pre-Inca days; and in Chile the Araucanians made a serpent figure in their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... put through their paces? These poor fragments of the ancient population of the Union have, if we exclude the Cherokees and Choctaws and two or three of the Gila tribes, literally nothing to show. The latter can present us with a faint trace of the long-faded civilization of their Aztec kindred, while the former have only borrowed a few of the rudest arts of the white, and are protected from extinction merely by the barrier of a frontier more and more violently assailed each year by the speculator and the settler, and already ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... (Odyssey xi. 575) also bears witness to this; for he represents kings and potentates, Tantalus, Sysiphus, and Tityus, as being tormented forever in Hades" ([Greek: en adon ton aei chronon timoronmenos]).-In the Aztec or Mexican theology, "the wicked, comprehending the greater part of mankind, were to expiate their sin in a place of everlasting darkness." PRESCOTT: Conquest of Mexico, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... Moriscan—but as much of it coming from the ancient blood of Anahuac—possibly from the famed Malinche herself. For the young lady delineated was the Condes Almonte—descended from one of Conquistadors who had wedded an Aztec princess—the beautiful Ysabel Almonte whose charms were at the time the toast of ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... millions on earth could gild or refine, and manners to match; some foolish, fashionable, would-be worldling, who combined the arch little coquetries and impertinent affectations of a spoilt beauty with the ugliness of an Aztec or an Esquimau; some silly, titled old frump who frankly ignored his tea-making wife and daughters and talked to him only—and only about her grotesque and ugly self—and told him of all the famous painters who had wanted to paint her for the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... conquests in the western world by undertaking the subjugation of the Aztec empire in Mexico in 1519. A few years later Pizarro established the Spanish power in Peru. It is hardly necessary to say that Europeans exhibited an utter disregard for the rights of the people with whom they came in contact, and treated them with contemptuous cruelty. Spain now superseded ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... conscientious scruples, and what one people would consider atrocious instances of wrong-doing, might be looked upon as innocent and even estimable by a people with a different moral standard. Religion has much to do with this. The human sacrifices and cannibal feasts of the Aztec Indians, for instance, were regarded by them as good deeds, obligations which they owed to their gods. Yet this people had attained to some of the refined practices ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... of the elaborate ornamentation found in the Aztec ruins in Mexico. The exterior of the house is absolutely plain. It is sometimes seven stories in height and contains over a thousand rooms. In some instances it is built of adobe—blocks of mud mixed with straw and dried in the sun, and in others, of stone covered with ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... Old World. The Incas of Peru. Aztec civilization in Mexico. The earliest centres of civilization in Mexico. The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. The Mound-Builders of the Mississippi Valley. Other types of Indian life. Why did the civilization ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... exodus of Mauresques from Aragon. To compute the loss of wealth and population inflicted upon Spain by these mad edicts, would be impossible. We may wonder whether the followers of Cortez, when they trod the teocallis of Mexico and gazed with loathing on the gory elf-locks of the Aztec priests, were not reminded of the Torquemada they had left at home. His cruelty became so intolerable that even Alexander VI. was moved to horror. In 1494 the Borgia appointed four assessors, with equal powers, to restrain the blood-thirst of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the Aztec Empire, with its millions of treasure, by Cortez had already proved the valiancy of Spanish cavaliers. To add to this, the conquest of the Incas by Pizarro and his followers was regarded a miracle of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... The ancient Aztecs used the game of ball as a training in warfare for the young men of the nation; and that it was considered of great importance is evident from the fact that the tribute exacted by a certain Aztec monarch from some of the cities conquered by him consisted of balls, and amounted to ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... tears to Breitmann's eyes, To find in many a shtand Vot oft he'd baid a quarder for To see in a distand land. De Aztec dwins und de Siamese (Dough soom vere a wachsen sham); Mit de Beardet Frau und de Bear Woman- All here ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... having gratuitously gleaned their entire contents, was in keeping with every other ludicrous phase of his distorted nature. He looked upon me as a paragon of stupidity; and I fear I considered him a piece of personal property, and felt as much pride in the possession as did Barnum in his Aztec children. ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... of the Zend, in the Sanscrit, in the effortless creed of Confucius, in the Aztec coloured-string writings and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left of the sunken Polynesian continent, hieroglyphs as useless as those of Memphis, nothing. Nothing! They have been tried, and were found an illusion. Think then, to-day, now looking from this apex of the pavement promontory ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... occasion concerning which these wayside views of Mexico were written. It was a holiday journey, but it is hoped that a description of it may impart to the general reader a portion of the pleasure and useful information which the author realized from an excursion into Aztec Land, full of novel ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... community of origin in some indefinitely remote past. We find these on the Maya side narrated in the sacred book of the Kiches, the Popol Vuh, in the Cakchiquel Records of Tecpan Atitlan, and in various pure Maya sources which I bring forward in this volume. The Aztec traditions refer to the Huastecs, and a brief analysis of them will not be ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... tradition, by tongue, was their common faith. Philip was in more than name the "Catholic King." Catholicism alone united the burgher of the Netherlands to the nobles of Castille, or Milanese and Neapolitan to the Aztec of Mexico and Peru. With such an empire heresy meant to Philip political chaos, and the heresy of Calvin, with its ready organization and its doctrine of resistance, promised not only chaos but active revolt. ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... aided in the pursuit, merely fled indoors. The people in Wapping are not always on the side of the pursuer. But the police held on. At last Ben and Toller slipped through the door of an empty house in Aztec Street barely ten yards ahead of their nearest pursuer. Blows rained on the door, but they slipped the bolts, and then fell panting to the floor. When Ben ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... strip of cotton, painted with a gaping bear, flaunt itself above Sonoma? Oh, abomination! Oh, execrable profanation! Mother of God, open thine ocean and suck them down! Smite them with pestilence if they put foot in our capital! Shrivel their fingers to the bone if they dethrone our Aztec Eagle and flourish their stars and stripes above our fort! O California! That thy sons and thy daughters should live to see thee plucked like a rose by the usurper! And why? Why? Not because these piratical Americans have the right to one league of our land; but because, Holy Evangelists! ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... Petrified Man had been entrusted to an artist devoted to the making of clothing dummies. Instead of an Aztec or Cave Dweller cast of countenance, he had given the Petrified Man the simpering features of the wax figures seen in cheap clothing stores. The result was that, instead of gazing at the Petrified Man with awe as a wonder of nature, ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... was of the Aztec rather than the Brahmin variety, nonetheless managed to radiate all the mystery of the East. "My well-being, dear Mrs. Jesser, is due to the fact that I have been communing for the past three months with my very good friend, the Fifth Dalai Lama. A most ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... places on the Mexican coast, and had held a friendly conference with one cacique, or chief, who seemed desirous of collecting all the information he could about the Spaniards, and their motives in visiting Mexico, that he might transmit it to his master, the Aztec emperor. Presents were exchanged at this interview, and in return for a few glass beads, pins, and such paltry trifles, the Spaniards had received such a rich treasure of jewels and gold ornaments that the general at once sent back one ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... adventure, which have been named, the fullest limits, in point of antiquity, which have under any circumstances been claimed, we cannot carry even this species of history beyond the year A. D. 1001; leaving 999 years to be accounted for, to the commencement of the Christian era. The Aztec empire which had reached such a point of magnificence when Mexico was first entered by Cortez, in 1519, did not, according to the picture writings and Mexican chronologists, date back farther than 1038, or by another authority, 958. The Toltecs, who ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the Greek. Yet he was far from Greek. "I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard," I have heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange and ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows, were wide apart and black with the blackness ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... specify the instruction mix —- sounds like smoke and mirrors to me." The phrase, popularized by newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin c.1975, has been said to derive from carnie slang for magic acts and 'freak show' displays that depend on 'trompe l'oeil' effects, but also calls to mind the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") for whom the hearts of huge numbers of human sacrificial victims were regularly cut out. Upon hearing about a rigged demo or yet another round of fantasy-based marketing promises, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Lisbon and Rio, Leith and Natal, Tokyo, Melbourne and the Golden Gate—wherever the sea ran green; of ginseng-growing in China, shellac gathering in India, cattle-grazing in Wyoming. He spoke of Alaskan totem-poles, of Indian sign language, of Aztec monoliths buried in the forest. He sang "Lather an' Shavin's," "La Golondrina," "The Cowboy's Lament," and, clicking his fingers castanet-wise, hummed little Spanish airs whose words he would by no ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Aztec [Footnote: The Aztec Indians of Mexico, like various other tribes in Central America and in Peru, had reached in many respects a high degree of civilization before the arrival of Europeans.] confederacy of Mexico, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... made by ancient peoples would be likely to contain representations of gesture signs, which subject is treated of below, it is proper to examine if traces of such gesture signs may not be found in the Egyptian, Chinese, and Aztec characters. Only a few presumptive examples, selected from a considerable number, are now presented in which the signs of the North American Indians appear to be included, with the hope that further investigation ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... little hammers. The music is rapid and brilliant, somewhat resembling that of the piano. The instrument usually has some fanciful name, which is painted upon it. The one at Tanatepec was La Azteca (The Aztec Lady), while our next one was La reina de las flores (The queen of the flowers). At Zanatepec, La Azteca was an advertising part of a traveling circus. The troupe consisted of three men and three women, the latter ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... the rovers, freebooters, privateers and buccaneers, put out in their crazy, ill-found craft, to rob and slay the Spaniard; while the mystery of the unknown still lay upon it; long after the mystery had mostly gone out of it, save for the mystery of the Aztec; it remained the Land of Romance when New England was fully settled and Virginia already an old colony; it was the English Land of Romance while King George's redcoats fought side by side with the colonials, to drive the French out of the ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... from the lame and impotent manner in which we had settled the Oregon question. Having kissed the Briton's boot, it became necessary to soothe our exasperated feelings by applying our own boot to the person of the Aztec. The man having been too much for us, we were bound to give the boy a sound beating, and that beating he received. True, we had cause of quarrel with Mexico, which we had long overlooked, and which had seldom moved us to anger, and never to the point of falling foul, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... fanciful paintings and hideous idols, and all the cheap pomp and pageantry of idolatrous worship. Strolling into one of these places, an attendant, noting my curious gazing, presents himself and points to a sign-board containing characters as meaningless to me as Aztec hieroglyphics. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... approximation to Plato's account of the destruction of Atlantis. "In one day and one fatal night," says Plato, "there came mighty earthquakes and inundations that ingulfed that warlike people." "In a single day all was lost," says the Aztec legend. And, instead of a rainfall of forty days and forty nights, as represented in the Bible, here we see "in a single day. . . even the mountains sunk into the water;" not only the land on which the people dwelt who were turned into fish, but ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Boys! I'll tell you of the torrid, Spanish Main, Where the tarpons leap and tumble in the silvery ocean plain, Where the wheeling condors circle; where the long-nosed ant-bears sniff At the food the Jackie "caches" in the Aztec warrior's cliff. ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... hear the Florentine, who from his palace Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din; And Aztec priests upon their teocallis Beat the wild war-drums made ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... the yarn, praying to God every other gasp that I'd beat Fernando Escobar to it. He said he had seen names there to set any man dreaming; the name of Montezuma and Guatomotzin; of Cortes and others. He figured that there was Aztec gold in it; that the three old priests had somehow tumbled on to the hiding place; that they three planned to keep the knowledge among themselves and, when they devoutly judged the time was right, to pass the news on ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... wealth which determined the future of their empire. Two years later Hernando Cortez, the greatest of the Conquistadores, was given command of the expedition which ended in the capture of Mexico and the overthrow of the Aztec power. The simple Mexicans, who had never seen a white man, first welcomed Cortez as the long expected Culture God, and the hapless Montezuma gathered as a present for the invader treasure equal in present value ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... e-dauda; Eskimo—Greenland ahtata, Aleutian ata, California, San Miguel tata; Mexico Aztec teta; Otomi, ta, te; Yucatan, Cakchequil tata; Central Am. Tarasca tata; Darien tauta; Eastern Peru, Mossa tata; Western ...
— The Dakotan Languages, and Their Relations to Other Languages • Andrew Woods Williamson
... surprised me. He said nothing of the two great classes, the rulers with much European blood, and the peons, largely or altogether Indian. There must be all sorts of Latin Americans, rich and poor, mixed blood of many strains, Castilian and Aztec and Inca, and whatever other people were here when Columbus set the fashion for American voyages. But this is where this 'missionary father-in-law' hit the heart of the trouble: Latin America has all sorts and conditions ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... horse, Demetrio felt like a new man. His eyes recovered their peculiar metallic brilliance, and the blood flowed, red and warm, through his coppery, pure-blooded Aztec cheeks. ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... some of that "one flesh" of which we all are made; but the blood—to go into finer distinctions—the blood, as distinguished from the milk of her Alibamon foster-mother, was the blood of the royal caste of the great Toltec mother-race, which, before it yielded its Mexican splendors to the conquering Aztec, throned the jeweled and gold-laden Inca in the South, and sent the sacred fire of its temples into the North by the hand of the Natchez. For it is a short way of expressing the truth concerning Red Clay's tissues to say she had the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... caught the infection. Even the scattered Aztecs of Mexico gathered around the ruins of their ancient temple at Cholula and waited a Messiah who should pour floods of lava from Popocatapetl, inundating all mortals not of Aztec race. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... character of Tezcatlipoca, "the god of gods," after having been maintained and worshipped as that great deity in person for a whole year. According to the old Franciscan monk Sahagun, our best authority on the Aztec religion, the sacrifice of the human god fell at Easter or a few days later, so that, if he is right, it would correspond in date as well as in character to the Christian festival of the death and resurrection of the Redeemer. More exactly he tells ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... noticing, she might not have pursued her inspiration further, but her mind was running along a breathless panorama of Niagara Falls, Great Lakes, Chicago, the farms of the Middle West, Yellowstone Park, geysers, the Old Man of the Mountain, Aztec ruins, redwood forests, orange groves and at the end of the vista—like a statue at the end of a garden walk—she imagined a great democratic institution of learning where one might conceivably be prepared to solve some of those problems which life seems to take such deep delight ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... stirring adventures is laid in Mexico of the present day, and the heroes, a little band of plucky men, penetrate to the heart of an unknown Aztec city. The well-written narrative is so full of exciting happenings that it is a favorable substitute for the ordinary sensational volume in ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... "to issue forth; (of flowers) to open, to blow; (of a butterfly) to come forth from the cocoon; (of chicks) to come forth from the egg; (of grains of maize) to burst; (of men) to be born"; in Nahuatl (Aztec), itzmolini signifies "to sprout, to grow, to be born"; in Delaware, an Algonkian Indian dialect, mehittuk, "tree," mehittgus, "twig," mehittachpin, "to be born," seem related, while gischigin means "to ripen, to ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... very prettily proved somewhere. Nay, the Mexicans, indeed, were of opinion that the lady at least ought to continue those cares of her person even after marriage. There is extant, in Sahagun's History of New Spain, the advice of an Aztec or Mexican mother to her daughter, in which she says—'That your husband may not take you in dislike, adorn yourself, wash yourself, and let your garments be clean.' It is true that the good lady adds,—'Do it in moderation; since, if every day you are washing yourself ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... gold mine in Mexico is known by the picturesque and mysterious name of The Four Fingers. It originally belonged to an Aztec tribe, and its location is known to one surviving descendant—a man possessing wonderful occult power. Should any person unlawfully discover its whereabouts, four of his fingers are mysteriously removed, and one by one ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Greek and Latin mythologies and poetic adaptations of history. The existing legends of flight, however, are not thus to be localised, for with two possible exceptions they belong to all the world and to every civilisation, however primitive. The two exceptions are the Aztec and the Chinese; regarding the first of these, the Spanish conquistadores destroyed such civilisation as existed in Tenochtitlan so thoroughly that, if legend of flight was among the Aztec records, it went with the rest; ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... the birthplace of its use by man. The first great explorer of the West found the sensuous natives of Hispaniola rolling up and smoking tobacco-leaves with the same persistent indolence that we recognize in the Cuban of the present day. Rough Cortes saw with surprise the luxurious Aztec composing himself for the siesta in the middle of the day as invariably as his fellow Dons in Castile. But he was amazed that the barbarians had discovered in tobacco a sedative to promote their reveries and compose them to sleep, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... may call the physical evidence in favor of the Aztec civilization having been thus disposed of by Mr. Wilson, we come now to his treatment of the written and traditional testimony, the accounts that have been handed down to us of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and of the condition of the country at the time when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Botticelli, by himself, in the "Adoration of the Magi," reveals a powerful physique and a striking personality. The man is as fine as an Aztec, as strong and self-reliant as a cliff- dweller. Character and habit are revealed in the jaw—the teeth of the Aztecs were made to grind corn in the kernel, and as long as they continued grinding dried corn in the kernel, they had good teeth. Dentists were not required until men began ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the Aztec dynasty set in blood. In vain did the inhabitants of the conquered city, roused to madness by the cruelty and extortion of the victors, expel them from their midst. Cortez refused to flee farther than the shore; the light of his burning galleys rekindled the desperate valor of his ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... Aztec and Maya were striving towards in the sixteenth century A.D., various Oriental nations had attained at least five or six thousand years earlier. In Egypt at the time of the pyramid-builders, and in Babylonia at the same epoch, the people had developed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... They speak the same language, as they are also of Mongolian origin. They came originally from Asia in an unexplained manner and over an unknown route. They have always been the enemies of the Pueblo Indians, who are descendants of the Toltec and Aztec races. Unlike the Pueblo Indians, who live in villages and maintain themselves with agricultural pursuits, the Navajos are ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... pounds, valued at 112,413 dollars, in 1867, to 754,886 pounds, valued at 226,465 dollars, in 1871. India-rubber was well-known to the ancient inhabitants of Central America. Before the Spanish conquest the Mexicans played with balls made from it, and it still bears its Aztec name of Ulli, from which the Spaniards call the collectors of it Ulleros. It is obtained from quite a different tree, and prepared in a different manner, from the rubber of the Amazons. The latter is taken from the Siphonia elastica, a Euphorbiaceous tree; ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... filled with weary searching. It was like the time when they had sought for the plain of the great ruined Temple in Mexico, that they might locate the underground city of gold. Only in this case they had no such landmark as a great Aztec ruin to ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... AN AZTEC PRINCE.—The largest tunnel in the world is that of St. Gothard, on the railroad line between Lucerne and Milan. The summit of this tunnel is 990 feet below the surface at Andermatt, and 6600 feet beneath the peak at Kastelhorn of the St. Gothard group. The tunnel itself ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... liquid melody. Then came his Cap of Maintenance, and three tiaras; then a company of mitred priests; next the cardinals in scarlet; and last, aloft beneath a canopy, upon the shoulders of men, and flanked by the mystic fans, advanced the Pope himself, swaying to and fro like a Lama, or an Aztec king. Still the trumpets blew most silverly, and still the people knelt; and as he came, we knelt and had his blessing. Then he took his state and received homage. After this the choir began to sing a mass of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and I was soon winding through the gorge-hung village. According to the manager, I had chosen well the time of my coming, for there was "something doing." We strolled about town until he had picked up the jefe politico, a handsome Mexican, built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... thing, when Cortes and Montezuma met, was the customary exchange of presents. Cortes presented Montezuma with a chain of colored glass beads, and in return the Aztec ruler gave Cortes a house which was large enough to accommodate all of ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw
... and pretending to be the original text of the sacred writings of the Indians of Central America, will be received by most people with a sceptical smile. The Aztec children who were shown all over Europe as descendants of a race to whom, before the Spanish conquest, divine honours were paid by the natives of Mexico, and who turned out to be unfortunate creatures that had been tampered ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Frontispiece A Dasylirion, 1 Cottonwood, 4 Cereus Greggii, a small cactus with enormous root, 5 Fronteras, 7 Remarkable Ant-hill, 8 Church Bells at Opoto, 10 Also a Visitor, 11 A Mexican from Opoto, 12 Rock-carvings near Granados, 15 The Church in Bacadehuachi, 17 Aztec Vase, Found in the Church of Bacadehuachi, 18 Agave Hartmani, a new species of century plant, 19 Ancient Pecking on a Trachyte Boulder one foot square, 20 In the Hills of Northeastern Sonora, 24 ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... ticket, and I went out to the Washington plane. It was a luxury ship, a fifty-two-passenger, four-engined DC-6, scheduled to be in the capital one hour after take-off. By morning this plane, the Aztec, ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... intention on the part of the architect. There are certain lights that have a way of dressing up the tower as a whole, giving it unity and hiding its ugliness. And at all times it has a kind of barbaric splendor. It might have come out of an Aztec mind, rather childish in expression, and seeking for beauty in an elemental way. I can imagine Aztecs living up there in a barbaric fashion, their houses piled, one above another, like ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... Lola, with her arm in a sling, began to sit up and to creep about, there was little in her manner to show the wisdom of Jane's cheerful forecast. The girl was still and reserved, as if some ancient Aztec strain predominated in her over all others. She watched the Vigils playing, the kids gamboling, the magpies squabbling; but never a lighter look stirred the chill calm of her little, russet-toned features, or the sombre depths of ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... which, after a few years of growth, mature and repeat their life cycle, while other young plants develop from the widely scattered seeds. The Spaniards at times call the plant Quiota. This word seems to be derived from quiotl, which is the Aztec name for Agave, from which plant a drink not unlike beer is produced, and suggests the possibility that there might have been a time when the succulent flower stem of the Yucca furnished drink as well ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... mean discovery, let me tell you that," he declared. "I am familiar with the Aztec, Toltec and Pueblo ruins, and here I find no similarity. Besides, we are out of their latitude. An ancient race of people—very ancient indeed lived in this canyon. How long ago, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... is in the garden, like a sort of pool, With walls of honeysuckle and orchids all around; The humming birds are always making a sleep sound; In the night there's the Aztec nightingale; But when the moon is up, in Nicaragua, The moon of Nicaragua and the million stars, It's the human heart that sings, and the heart of Nicaragua, To the pleading, plaintive ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... in v. 10, nauhxiuhtica, "after four years," appears to refer to the souls of the departed brave ones, who, according to Aztec mythology, passed to the heaven for four years and after that returned to the terrestrial Paradise,—the palace of Tlaloc. (See my paper, The Journey of the Soul, in Proceedings of the Numismatic and Antiquarian ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... dinge. She's an Aztec, an' them Aztec's is swell people. Say, she can play a guitar like ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach |
