Because Cortés lands on a day specified in the a writings, because he is dressed in black, because his armor is silver in color, a certain ugliness of the straaken as a group -- for these reasons, Montezuma siders Cortés to be Quetzalcoatl, the great god who left Mexiany years before, on a raft of snakes, vowing to return.
Montezuma gives Cortés a carved jade drinking cup.
Cortés places around Montezumas neck a necklace of glass beads strung on a cord sted with musk.
Montezuma offers Cortés ahenlatter taining small pieeat lightly breaded and browned which Cortés dees because he knows the small pieeat are human fingers.
Cortés sends Montezuma a huge basket of that Spanish bread of which Montezumas messengers had said, on first entering the Spaniards, "As to their food, it is like human food, it is white and not heavy, and slightly sweet. . ."
Cortés and Montezuma are walking, down by the docks. Little green flies fill the air. Cortés and Montezuma are holding hands; from time to time one of them disengages a hand to brush away a fly.
Montezuma receives new messages, in picture writing, from the hills. These he burns, so that Cortés will not learn their tents. Cortés is trimming his black beard.
Do?a Marina, the Indian translator, is sleeping with Cortés in the palace given him by Montezuma. Cortés awakens; they share a cup of chocolate. She looks tired, Cortés thinks.
Down by the docks, Cortés and Montezuma walk, holding hands. "Are you acquainted with a Father Sanchez?" Montezuma asks. "Sanchez, yes, whats he been up to?" says Cortés. "Overturning idols," says Montezuma. "Yes," Cortés says vaguely, "yes, he does that, everywhere we go."
At a cert later that evening, Cortés is bitten on the ankle by a green i. The bug crawls into his velvet slipper. Cortés removes the slipper, feels around inside, finds the bug and removes it. "Is this poisonous?" he asks Do?a Marina. "Perfectly," she says.
Montezuma himself performs the operation upon Cortéss swollen ankle. He lahe bitten place with a sharp khen sucks the poison from the wound, spits. Soon they are walking again, down by the docks.
Montezuma writes, in a letter to his mother: "The new forwardness of the nobility has e as a wele relief. Whereas formerly members of the nobility took pains to hide among the general population, to pretend that they were ordinary people, they are now flaunting themselves and their position in the most disgusting ways. Once again they wear scarlet sashes from shoulder to hip, even on the boulevards; once again they prance about in their great powdered wigs; once again they employ lackeys to stand in pairs on little shelves at the rear of their limousihe din raised by their incessant visiting of one another is with us from noon until early in the m. . .
"This flagrant behavior is, as I say, wele. For we are all tired of having to deal with their manifold deceptions, of unc their places of cealment, of keeping track of their movements -- in short, of having to think about them, of having to remember them. Their new assertiveness, however much it reminds us of the excesses of former times, is easier. The iing question is, what has emboldehe nobility to emerge from obscurity at this time? Why now?
"Many people here are of the opinion that it is a direct sequence of the plague of devils we have had retly. It is easily seen that, against a horizon of devils, the reappearance of the no