"Aztec" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... animal bigness, with no commensurate contents to show for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical fooling 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 be sure, I might swim for a certain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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. ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... 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 returned to him. The appearance of the final fourth ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... at Washington and at 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 ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... 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 with by heartless speculators, are still fresh in the memory ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... to Prescott about his book, with which I was perfectly charmed. I think his descriptions masterly, his style brilliant, his purpose manly and gallant always. The introductory account of Aztec civilization impressed me exactly as it impressed you. From beginning to end, the whole history is enchanting and full of genius. I only wonder that, having such an opportunity of illustrating the doctrine of visible judgments, he never remarks, when Cortes and his ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... remarked, the noble Red Indian had 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 ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... the army and navy does not go to get whipped with them," growls an old major of the famed Aztec Club. And the scar across the nose, that he brought away from the Belen Gate, grows very ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... experiment, as Voltaire has 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; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... 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 ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... son of Charles, who was the son of Joanna, who was the daughter of Isabella, whose husband was Ferdinand. By what seems to us the most whimsical of political arrangements, the Papuan islander, the Calabrian peasant, the Amsterdam merchant, the semi-civilized Aztec, the Moor of Barbary, the Castilian grandee, the roving Camanche, the Guinea negro, the Indian Brahmin, found themselves—could they but have known it—fellow-citizens of one commonwealth. Statutes of family descent, aided by fraud, force, and chicane, had annexed the various European sovereignties ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... deposed a Sultan in Borneo in order to aid another to the throne, and even asked permission of King Philip II. to conquer China, which of course was not conceded to him. Vide also the history of the destruction of the Aztec (Mexican) and Incas (Peruvian) dynasties by the Spaniards, in W. H. Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... term be felt in objects without that little bit of intrinsic worth of form? Is not such indeed the fact? What else is the meaning of the story of "Beauty and the Beast"? The squat and hideous Indian idol, the scarabaeus, the bit of Aztec pottery, become attractive and desired for themselves by virtue of their halo of pleasure from dim associations. And all these values are felt as completely OBJECTIFIED, and so fulfill the requirements ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... 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 ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... the Aztec traders had arrived was a matter of as much interest, to Roger, as to the people of the town. These looked forward to purchasing many things which they could not otherwise obtain; for the gold ornaments, the rich feather mantles, and most of the other articles of superior manufacture which ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... crumpled rose-leaves. 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... the course of transcription or of printing. As specimens I mention two, because they have unfortunately perverted ordinary usage. The two words Coco and Cocoa—the former a Portuguese word[12], naming the coco-nut, the fruit of a palm-tree; the latter a latinized form of Cacao, the Aztec name of a Central American shrub, whence we have cocoa and chocolate—were always distinguished down to Johnson's time, and were in fact distinguished by Johnson himself in his own writings. His account of these in the Dictionary is quoted from Miller's Gardener's Dictionary and Hill's Materia ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... 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 ...
— Options • O. Henry
... mighty God. Caliban will persist in the belief that the visible system was created in Setebos's moment of being ill at ease and in cruel sportiveness. Nature is a freak of a foul mind. But Caliban's god is not solitary. How hideous were the Aztec gods! They were pictured horrors. Montezuma's gods were Caliban's. Caliban's Setebos was another Moloch of the Canaanites, or a Hindoo Krishna. And the Greek and Norse gods were the infirm shadows ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... his share of his father's three square leagues, whatever 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 ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... undecipherable inscriptions; and many similarities lend weight to the theory that the empire of the Mound-Builders, in the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri valleys, was the result of a great Toltec migration from Central America, which they left to Aztec dominion. Thus while we call our continent the "New World," it is not improbable that we may be living in a country which was alive with art, splendor, invention, and power, when Europe was a dreary waste, over which the now extinct monsters roamed ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... deity is not easily determined, though it occurs in the Codices Troano and Cortesianus with extraordinary frequency, so that it would be seen that these two manuscripts, which evidently belong together, treat principally of this deity. No analogous deity is found in Aztec picture writing. * * * To all appearances we have here a momentous figure of Maya mythology, of which, unfortunately, we ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... 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
... Denmark direct; then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you will, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the Turk at Constantinople or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocrat belongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he has ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... 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
... has been done. The meaning of Nature's law, in this extraordinary world, is 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 destined to become royal bridegrooms for a single night,—that ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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
... 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 worst, crowded almost to its door. It ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... 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 ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... a philosophical ground for argumentation. The Fijian does not feel disgust at the flavor of a well-roasted white sailor; and as long as he does not insist upon our relishing his fare, what right have we to ask him to feel disgusted? When the panther-tailed Aztec priest fattened his prisoner, or carried along the children decked with wreaths, soon to be smothered in their own juice, he cannot have felt disgust, any more than the Malay, of whom Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tells us, that, with epicurean refinement, he cut the choicest bits ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... pathetic ending has 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 figures, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... to Cortes as Captain-General and marched with him back to Mexico. Here great events were in progress. Moved to the deed by fear or by the discovery of some real or fancied plot against the Spaniards, Alvarado, the deputy of Cortes, had fallen upon the unarmed Aztec nobles while they were celebrating a feast in the courtyard of the great temple, and butchered some six hundred of them with every circumstance of brutality. Then at last the patient Aztecs rose and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... light on the elevated plains of Mexico, seen for forty nights consecutively i8n 1509, and observed in the eastern horizon rising pyramidally from the earth, was the zodiacal light. I found a notice of this phenomenon in an ancient Aztec MS., the 'CodexTelleriano-Remensis',* preserved in ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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
... Indian," whispered Belding, hoarsely. "Damn if I don't believe he understood every word Mercedes said. And, gentlemen, don't mistake me, if he ever gets near Senor Rojas there'll be some gory Aztec knife work." ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... 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 she will go—through marshy places and ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the 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; as to the Chinese, it is more than passing strange that they, who claim ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... 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
... entire area drained by the Rio Grande del Norte was occupied by pueblo tribes, and a number are still inhabited. To the south they extended far beyond the territory of the United States, and the so-called Aztec cities were rather superior pueblos of this character. The known pueblo tribes of the United States belong to several different linguistic stocks. They are far from being one homogeneous people, for they have not only different languages but ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... 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
... 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 character of the deities. Next we have the reports ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... instance, between the Eskimos, along the whole northern districts of this continent, and the Indians of the United States, those of Mexico, those of Peru, and those of Brazil? Is there any real connection between the coast tribes of the northwest coast, the mound builders, the Aztec civilization, the Inca, and the Gueranis? It seems to me no more than between the Assyrian and Egyptian civilization. And as to negroes, there is, perhaps, a still greater difference between those of Senegal, of Guinea, and the Caffres and Hottentots, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... young man was annually sacrificed in the 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. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... dinge. She's an Aztec, an' them Aztec's is swell people. Say, she can play a guitar like ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... a work by Professor Wilson of the Smithsonian Institute, here we have the great Swastika, or 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, we require that the four pieces shall be produced by only two ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... 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 me up ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is full of a philosophy in a transition state, from physitheism to psychotheism; and, mark! the people discovered in this transition state were inventing an alphabet—they were carving Runes. Then a pure physitheism was discovered in the Aztec barbarism of Mexico; and elsewhere on the globe many people were found in that stage of culture to which this philosophy properly belongs. Thus the existence of physitheism as a stage of philosophy is abundantly attested. ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... Spain own. It was, of course, Spain's insane policy of keeping the Pacific 'a closed sea' that concealed the achievements of the Mexican pilots and buried them in oblivion. But if actual accomplishments count, these pilots with their ragged peon crews, half-bloods of Aztec woman and Spanish adventurer, deserve higher rank in the roll of Pacific coast exploration than history ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... some distance north of San Fernando, and one of the wildest and roughest of those half explored regions. And what marvels attended the labors of Serra and the other self-sacrificing sons of Saint Francis here! With Junipero Serra at the helm, the good priests learned some of the Aztec dialects in order to convert the savages. Then what followed? With the greatest patience the missionaries acquitted themselves to the task of teaching the classic, cultured language of Spain to these poor aborigines, ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... 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.
... 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 ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... uniformity, and here you can detect an 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, ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... patronizing, loud-voiced nouvelle-riche with a low-bred physiognomy that no 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 last hundred ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Germany, as late as the close of the sixteenth century. 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 ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Margaret" showed him to be a romancer of a higher order. "Trepanned" is a story of 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 ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... the middle of the plain, appeared a ruin of adobe walls, guttered and fissured by the weather. It was undoubtedly a monument of that partially civilized race, Aztec, Toltec, or Moqui, which centuries ago dotted the American desert with cities, and passed away without leaving other record. With his field-glass Thurstane discovered what he judged to be another similar structure crowning a distant ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... 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 from Jourdanet's ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 scepticism, nor hypercritical analysis, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... was made, took him to the mill, situated in a wide rotunda. Here two upright wooden cylinders, fitting close to one another, revolved on a pivot, set in action by means of two oxen yoked together, crushing the canes which an Aztec[C] was introducing between them. The machine groaned, and seemed almost ready to fall to pieces under the impetus of the powerful animals, which were urged on both by voice and gesture. Lucien remarked that the canes were cut ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... the total destruction of my marvellous talent, which died of cerebro-musical excitement when confronted with the gamut. Except as the language in which Strauss appeals to my waltzing genius, I have no more use for it than for ancient Aztec. Thank Heaven! this is a progressive age, and girls are no longer tormented as formerly by piano fiends, who once persisted in pounding and squeezing music into their poor struggling nauseated souls, as relentlessly as girls' feet are still ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... bizarre nightmare, no more astonishing than the novels the Lapierres had read. America, they understood, was a land where the rivers were full of gold—a country of bronzed and handsome savages, of birds of paradise and ruined Aztec temples, of vast tobacco fields and plantations of thousands of acres of cotton cultivated by naked slaves, while one lay in a hammock fanned by a "petite negre" and languidly sipped eau sucree. The General had made it all seem very, very real. At the weak spots he had gesticulated ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... somehow bore a remarkable similarity to that of Dr. Morse. He was also the scion of a wealthy family who spent much time traveling throughout the world, and in this process becoming fluent in no less than thirty languages. Eventually he encountered an Aztec princess about to be tortured and sacrificed by Navajo Indians; he interrupted this ceremony only to be captured himself, but by virtue of successfully foretelling an eclipse (happily he had his almanac with him) he won release for himself and the princess. ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... 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 ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... 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, hackers often feel ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... 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, the audiences ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... bless him at the same time. After selling his linens at a great advance on the cost price, considering he had only paid his daughter for them, and having given a series of the most successful concerts ever known in those latitudes, Signor G—— set forth for the Aztec City. As the relations of meum and tuum were not upon the most satisfactory footing just then at Vera Cruz, he thought it most prudent to carry his well-won treasure with him to the capital. His progress thither was a triumphal procession. Not Corts, not General Scott, himself, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... woman shaped like a pyramid. Even her head, on which the black coarse hair was bobbed high, finished in a peak—the unmistakable mark of the ancient Aztec blood in her veins. Her shoulders sloped away from her three chins and it seemed as though the greatest circumference of her body must be at her ankles, for her skirt flared. Rosita had guessed at her waist-line and had tied a ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... on oyster shells. Palaeolithic man did his usual sporting sketches on shells, and there was a vast and varied art of designing on shells among the pre-Columbian natives of North America. {137} We here see the most primitive scratches developing into full-blown Aztec art. ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... 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
... punishment, for no Aztec ever worshipped his stone God more devoutly than I did my black-eyed, smooth-lipped idol. 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' Ah! my 'graven image' seemed so marvellously godlike that I bowed down before it; and there, in the midst of my adoration, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the province of the folklorist. But, whatever the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs connected with the noise, may be, no one would explain them as the result of community of race between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered to account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of furniture is an omen of death in a house. Obviously, these opinions are the expression of a common state of superstitious fancy, not the signs of an original community ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... live." This "God of all purity," as he is addressed in a Mexican prayer, was too elevated for vulgar thought or representation. No altars or temples were erected to him; and it was only under one of the later kings of the Aztec monarchy that a temple was built to the "Unknown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... 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 ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... speech nor attitude moves her. She lies as ever, still, silent. Wrapped in the Mexican blanket—whose pattern of Aztec design bears striking resemblance to the hieroglyphs of Egypt—this closed and corded round her figure, she might easily be mistaken for a mummy, one of Pharaoh's daughters taken out of the sarcophagus in which for centuries ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... of animal form, to the art of the Mexicans; but to me they seem more like delightful German Romanesque workmanship, leaning more towards that of certain spirited Lombard grotesques, or even that of Arles and certain parts of France, than to the Aztec to which Didron has reference. The little climbing figures, while they certainly have very large hands and feet, yet are endowed with a certain sprightly action; they all give the impression of really making an effort,—they are trying to climb, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... an archdiocese (by papal bull of July 8, 1547); but on account of his great age he declined the honor, and died (June 3, 1548) a few days after those documents arrived, being eighty years old. A cloud upon his memory is the ruthless and vandalic destruction, under his direction, of the Aztec images, manuscripts, and other records, both public and private, for which his agents made close search, not only in the City of Mexico but in all the larger cities and towns—a cruel and irreparable loss to scholars and historians. See Bancroft's ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... 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 ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... lastly, a 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 ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... Birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon Richard II Geographical Monsters An Astrolabe Vasco da Gama Christopher Columbus (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) Isabella Ship of 1492 A.D. The Name "America" Ferdinand Magellan Aztec Sacrificial Knife Aztec Sacrificial Stone Cabot Memorial Tower John Wycliffe Martin Luther Charles V John Calvin Henry VIII Ruins of Melrose Abbey Chained Bible St. Ignatius Loyola Philip II The Escorial William the Silent Elizabeth Crown of Elizabeth's ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Amerindian tribes 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... picture writing. Assuming that ideographic pictures 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 by collaborators will ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... 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 ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell |
