"Aztec" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doubt, Vanamee's talk that had stimulated him to this point. The story of the Long Trail, with its desert and mountain, its cliff-dwellers, its Aztec ruins, its colour, movement, and romance, filled his mind with picture after picture. The epic defiled before his vision like a pageant. Once more, he shot a glance about him, as if in search of the inspiration, and this time he all but found it. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... 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 ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... that are inhabited to this day with peaceful Indians who have seldom seen a white face. The country is scattered with the ruins of wonderful temples and cathedrals and, doubtless, much of the old Aztec treasure still lies buried for some enterprising fortune-seeker to unearth. There are also immense forests of cedar and mahogany and other hard woods to be cut; and extensive areas of land suitable for sugar planting ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... have tripped them up or 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 could ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... orange-blossoms, cripples, heroes, dwarfs and beauties, all together. Not on any such scene of the Season let us look, where the doors are locked behind us at eleven o'clock, but on one of its "balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to midday." It is like an Aztec revel for its flowers: the great stairways, leading up and down between the rooms that glow with light and resound with the tones of flute and violin, are wound with shrubs where art conceals everything ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... 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
... not furnish us with 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... overseen the like of these long before in Italy; but they were admirably arranged in this museum, so that without the eager help of the custodians (which two cents would buy at any turn) we could have found pleasure in them, whereas the Aztec antiquities were mostly copies in plaster and the ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... 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, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... movements was to awaken envy, hatred, and malice in the hearts of those excluded from the mysterious rites, which to outsiders seemed to consist in blackballing as many aspirants as possible. Some victims of this bad treatment, thirsting for revenge, struck on the happy thought of inaugurating an “Aztec” society. As that title conveyed absolutely no idea to any one, its members were forced to explain that only descendants of officers who fought in the Mexican War were eligible. What the elect did when they got into the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... touched at various 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 ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... 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 returned to ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... 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 has yet ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... 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; it may be, leaving ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... 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 the record of ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... 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. Thereafter he led ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... of the ancient 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, was overthrown in 1519 ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... cloud about as big as a toy balloon down in the southeast corner he gets morose as a badger. If it starts to drizzle what you'd call a light fog he holes up. When it rains he hibernates like a bear, and the streets look like one of these populous and thriving Aztec metropoli you see down Sonora way. I guess every man is privileged to get just about so sore on the weather wherever he is—and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... in 1876, the hills and plains were covered with high 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 ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... 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; but in Central America the tree ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... the 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; since if ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... single exception of Boturini. As this author's views in regard to the calendar are so radically different from all other authorities as to induce the belief that it applies to some other than the Aztec or true Mexican calendar we will probably be justified in eliminating his ...
— Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts • Cyrus Thomas
... 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
... 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. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... which, instead of selling it, he converted cleverly enough into an altar-cloth; and for several years afterwards, the communion at Northam was celebrated upon a blaze of emerald, azure, and crimson, which had once adorned the sinful body of some Aztec prince. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... 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 ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... each other in their wars, and divide the spoil on a fixed scale. During a century of warfare this alliance was faithfully adhered to and the confederates met with great success. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, just before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Aztec dominion reached across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There was thus included in it territory thickly peopled by various races, themselves warlike, and little inferior to the Aztecs in social organisation. What ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... 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 ...
— Options • O. Henry
... 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 ruins which illustrate the civilization of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... 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
... "eastward 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 Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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
... upon the horizon. But the new continent was vast in extent. It blocked the westward path from pole to pole. With each voyage, too, the resources and the native beauty of the new land became more apparent. The luxuriant islands of the West Indies, and the Aztec empire of Mexico, were already bringing wealth and grandeur to the monarchy of Spain. South of Mexico it had been already found that the great barrier of the continent extended to the cold tempestuous seas of the Antarctic region. Magellan's voyage (1519-22) had proved indeed that by rounding South ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... of 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 ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... 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 own right, but as yet he had found no use for the income that was piling ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 friend to a ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... 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 ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... 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 day was to be the last of the once flourishing empire. Cortes' ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... speak of Mexico without having our minds drawn to the time of the Aztec monarchy,—when sumptuous palaces, enormous temples, fortresses, and other public edifices covered the face of the country. In the midst of the territory, on the western shore of the large lake of ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 to believe any ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... beyond that the 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 every cercle ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... symbolic interpretation. The concentric spirals with a broken 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 ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... 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 somewhere ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... 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 ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... romanticising schools, is far 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and the Crusades 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 not the remotest idea of dying, who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... unpronounceable of 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 from Jourdanet's French translation of Fray Bernardino ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... in a museum looking at a case of mummies. One of them was marked "Mummy of an Aztec, found in a Cliff Dwelling," and it interested me very much. In size it was that of a small man, and was in a fine state of preservation, with the exception that the bones of the legs were exposed, and more or less disintegrated, ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... checked my 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, would be ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... 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 ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... 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 that Mrs. Saltillo's superiority would speedily tame him. Since his brief and ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... (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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various |
