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The one thousand three hundred acre park lies at the western end of the city and the broad boulevard of the Reforma continues on for two miles between its flower gardens, natural woodlands, lakes and recreation grounds; but next morning Adam's taxi turned off to mount the steep wooded hill on which stands Chapultepec Castle.

It had been built by one of the Spanish Viceroys in the eighteenth century and now contains a museum of arms, pictures and furniture; but its main interest was that it had been the residence of the ill fated Austrian Archduke Maximilian. In the early 1860s Mexico 's series of revolutions had so bedeviled her finances that the European Powers had decided to protect their interests by

intervening. Napoleon III had offered Maximilian the support of

French troops if he would go out, become Emperor and restore the stability of the country. He had ascended the throne in 1864, but reigned only for three years. A liberal minded, kindly man who spent most of his time collecting butterflies, he had proved hopelessly incapable as a ruler. A Zapotec Indian named Benito Juarez had led a rebellion, the French troops had been withdrawn, Maximilian's forces had been defeated, he had been captured and executed by a firing squad.

There were still many relics of Maximilian and his beautiful Empress, Carlotta, in the rooms they had occupied. Adam found them pathetic, and their furniture hideous, but he had already ruled out the idea of using this period as the background for a book because their tragic story was so well known.

That applied even more to Hernando Cortes; but in one of the larger halls a spacious modern mural by Diego Rivera greatly intrigued him. It portrayed all the rulers of Mexico, from the Conquest on; and, among them, Cortes was shown as a hideous, wasted, bandy legged man with a head like a skull.

Turning to his guide, Adam asked why the firm faced and virile Spanish hero should have been represented as such a hideous creature.

The fat little guide sniffed and replied, `To Mexicans he is no hero. He brought to our people much suffering, and he is so portrayed here because, when he died, he was riddled with syphilis.'

`That is news to me,' Adam remarked, `and I have read pretty widely about him. What grounds have you for believing that he was a syphilitic?'

The guide then told him that in 1823, when the heroes who fell in the War of Independence had been re interred with honour in Mexico City, the priests had feared that the Indian mobs might desecrate Cortes' grave; so they had removed his remains and secretly bricked them up in a wall of the chapel of the Hospital of Jesus, which Cortes had founded. Then in 1946 the finding of an old document had led to their discovery. Mexican anthropologists had examined the four hundred year old bones and it was upon their assessment that Cortes was now said to have been a syphilitic monstrosity.

Adam would have given long odds that this was a vindictive libel arising from the intense hatred with which the Mexicans had come to regard the Conquistadores; for he had read every book about them that he could get hold of, and knew that even Cortes'

enemies who had known him in his lifetime had written of him as a sombrely handsome man, with a body that was capable of

almost tireless endurance; although, of course, the popular belief that he had conquered Mexico with five hundred Spaniards and, sixteen horses was a myth.

The fact was that during his campaigns he had had many thousands of Indian allies. In 1519, when the Spaniards had landed at Vera Cruz, the Totonac caciques, who then ruled that part of Mexico, had received them with awe; then, when they had disclosed their intention of marching against the Aztec capital, willingly assisted them by supplying stores, porters and a great army of warriors.

There had been a very good reason for that. The Aztecs had appeared out of the north only two centuries earlier. Previous to that the Mayas and numerous other races who occupied different parts of the country had, from as early as 2000 B.C., built up splendid civilizations. They had achieved a high art: their engineers had constructed immense buildings and suspension bridges cross the gorges in the mountains; their astronomers had produced a calendar that was more accurate than that then in use in Europe.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, had been fierce barbarians of an almost unbelievable cruelty. Having driven the inhabitants from the Central Plateau, they had established themselves on the island of Tenochtitlan then, from that fortress, sallied forth to conquer the whole of Mexico and turn its peoples into subject races. They waged war constantly, not alone for plunder but mainly to secure hordes of sacrificial victims with which to propitiate their blood lusting god Huitzilopochtli. So it was no wonder that Cortes had found allies on all sides willing to aid him in destroying their Aztec overlords, and it was to his leadership that they owed their escape from this terrible tyranny. He had on occasion acted with great harshness as the only means of maintaining his extremely precarious authority but he was not by nature a cruel man, and it is recorded that he threatened with death any of his own followers who were caught maltreating the Indians. Other Conquistadores, particularly Francisco Pizarro in Peru, and Nuno de Guzman, who, after Cortes' retirement, became master of New Spain, disgraced themselves by inflicting senseless cruelties and forcing many thousands of the conquered peoples into slavery. But the Church sent violent protests back to Spain and soon received sanction to protect the Indians by setting up special Courts before which they could freely state their grievances. It was, too, a remarkable fact that he Council of the Indies, sitting in Seville, whose authority was paramount in the New World, decreed the abolition of slavery in 1532 three hundred years before President Lincoln did so in the United States.

Great numbers of Indians unquestionably lost their lives as a result of the Conquest, but only a comparatively small percentage of their deaths was due to fighting the Spaniards. By far the greater part were carried off by smallpox, typhus, measles and other diseases previously unknown in the New World. Terrible epidemics ravaged the country, depopulating whole districts; but for that the Spaniards could hardly be blamed.

The Conquest, on the other hand, brought many benefits to Mexico. Before that the diet available to the Indians was extraordinarily monotonous. Even the nobles had lived almost entirely on maize cakes, fruit and a little fish. Wheat, rice, barley, lentils, onions and potatoes were unknown, the latter having been brought from South America. They had no cattle, pigs or goats; so had no milk, butter or cheese, no grease with which to fry and, only occasionally, the meat of birds and small animals. They had no carts, horses or beasts of burden; so the only transport for articles of commerce consisted of porters trained to the exhausting work of bearing on their backs for many hours a day sacks weighing up to a hundred pounds suspended from bands across their foreheads. They were excellent weavers and dyers, but had not invented the button; so their main garment was a square piece of material with a hole in the middle through which they put their heads and, as it could not be done up, it dangled awkwardly about them, exposing their lower limbs to the cold. They had neither windmills nor watermills with which to grind their maize, so had to pound it laboriously in mortars. They had no iron or steel, so had patiently to chip pieces of obsidian to produce a sharp edge for all cutting implements and weapons. For tilling the earth they had no ploughs; so to sow their crops they had to use a stout pointed stick and make thousands of holes into each of which a single seed was dropped.

Through disease and, at times, brutality, the Indians had certainly endured much suffering under their conquerors; but the belief that their Spanish masters had used them worse than had the British, French or Dutch the peoples of the countries they had colonized Adam knew to be untrue; and he thought it regrettable that, since the Mexicans had gained independence, their politicians should have indoctrinated them with their hatred of the Spaniards, to whom their country owed so much.