About fifty miles from the city of Mexico is a town named Tula, formerly Tollan, which means perhaps "the place of many people." A road, shaded by great ash-trees leads across the river Tula, through a narrow pass to some ruins of an ancient civilization, ruins already when the city of Montezuma, which Cortés found flourishing, arose. A building of ancient stone is still there, laid in mud and covered with hard cement of a ruddy tint, with which the floors are also covered. The largest room in the building is not more than fifteen feet square. Another building farther on, larger than the first, is called the _Casa Grande_; it contains about thirty small rooms, connected by stairways, as their height above the ground varies. The plaza of the little town Tula contains the portion of a column and the lower half of a colossal statue, which belong, as well as the buildings just described, to the period of the Toltecs, whose capital was the ancient Tollan. Their city was abandoned a hundred years before the Aztecs entered it, and its founders scattered. Whence came the shadowy race whose history vaguely underlies that of later Mexican races?
The great mound which since Humboldt's time has been called the pyramid of Cholula, of which every child has seen a picture in his geography, has now all the appearance of a natural hill. It is overgrown with verdure and trees; torrents of water in the rainy seasons have cut crevices in its sides, and laid bare wide spaces. A good paved road now leads to the summit, where a pretty modern church looks down upon the little town of Cholula huddled round the base of the pyramid. The church and the road leading to it are the work of the Spaniards, but examination proves the whole mound to be built by men out of earth, broken limestone, little pebbles, and small bits of lava. Sun-dried bricks were employed, of varying sizes and different make, which aids the idea that the mound was built slowly and by differing methods. On the platform at the top, which was reached by five successive terraces, Cortés found a temple, which he caused to be destroyed. The dates fixed for the erection of this pyramid vary from the seventh to the tenth century of our era. Conjecture only offers explanation of the purpose for which it was erected. Legends which the neighboring Indians preserve say that it was built in preparation for a second deluge. Another version is that men dazzled by the splendor of the scene sought to erect a tower which should reach the firmament; the heavenly powers, wroth with their audacity, destroyed the edifice and dispersed the builders. Cholula was one of the important cities of the Toltecs, but its construction is attributed to an earlier people.