Don Amador de Leste, attended by De Morla, as well as his new acquaintance, Alvarado, was able to understand, as well as admire, many of the wonders of the city, as he now, for the first time, planted his foot on its imperial streets.
The retreat of the salt waters of Tezcuco has left the present republican city of Mexico a full league west of the lake. In the days of Montezuma, it stood upon an island two miles removed from the western shore, with which it communicated by the dike or _calzada_ of Tlacopan,--now called Tacuba. The causeway of Iztapalapan, coming from the South, seven miles in length, passed over the island and through the city, and was continued in a line three miles further to the northern shore, and to the city Tepejacac, where now stand the church and the miraculous picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Besides these three great causeways, constructed with inconceivable labour, there were two others,--that of Cojohuacan, which, as we have mentioned, terminated in the greater one of Iztapalapan, at the military point Xoloc, a half league from the city; and that, a little south-ward of the dike of Tacuba, which conveyed, in aqueducts of earthenware, the pure waters of Chapoltepec to the temples and squares of the imperial city. The island was circular, saving that a broad angle or peninsula ran out from the north-west, and a similar one from the opposite point of the compass: it was a league in diameter; but the necessities of the people, after covering this ample space with their dwellings, extended them far into the lake; and perhaps as many edifices stood, on piles, in the water as on the land. The causeways of Iztapalapan and Tacuba, intersecting each other in the heart of the island, divided the city into four convenient quarters, to which a fifth was added, some few generations before, when the little kingdom of Tlatelolco, occupying the north-western peninsula, was added to Tenochtitlan. On this peninsula and in this quarter of Tlatelolco, stood the palace of an ancient king, which the munificence of Montezuma had presented to Cortes for a dwelling, and which the invader, six days after the gift, by an act of as much treachery as daring, converted into the prison of his benefactor.