Anahuac; Or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. Ancient and Modern - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1861. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... delivered from the impending destruction. A number of earthquakes took place, which caused the ground to split in large fissures, down which the superfluous water disappeared. For none of her many miracles has the Virgin of Guadalupe got so much credit as for this. To be sure, it iS not generally mentioned in orthodox histories of the affair, that she was brought to the capital a year or two before the earthquakes happened. Talking of earthquakes, it is to be remembered that we are in a district where they are of continual occurrence. If one looks carefully at a line of houses in a street, it is curious to see how some walls slope inwards, and some outwards, and some are cracked from top to bottom. There is hardly a church-tower in Mexico that is not visibly out of the perpendicular. Anyone who has noticed how the walls of the Cathedral of Pisa have been thrown out of the perpendicular by the settling down of the foundations, will have an idea of the general appearance of the larger buildings of Mexico. On different occasions the destruction caused by earthquakes has been very great. By the way, the liability of Mexico to these shocks, explains the peculiarity of the building of the houses. A modern English town with two-or-threestoried houses, with their thin brick walls, would be laid in ruins by a shock which would hardly affect Mexico. Here, the houses of several storeys have stone walls of such thickness that they resist by sheer strength; and the one-storey mud houses, in the suburbs, are too low to suffer much by being shaken about. A few days before we arrived here, our friends Pepe and Pancho were playing at billiards in the Lonja, the Merchants' Exchange; and J The " Lonja" is a feature in the commercial towns of Spanish America. It is not only the Mer...