american-holocaust

~ 1IT's GONE NOW, drained and desiccated in the aftermath of the Spanishconquest, but once there was an interconnected complex of lakes highup in the Valley of Mexico that was as long and as wide as the cityof London is today. Surrounding these waters, known collectively as theLake of the Moon, were scores of towns and cities whose population,combined with that of the outlying communities of central Mexico, totaledabout 25,000,000 men, women, and children. On any given day as manyas 200,000 small boats moved back and forth on the Lake of the Moon,pursuing the interests of commerce, political intrigue, and simple pleasure.1The southern part of the Lake of the Moon was filled with brilliantlyclear spring-fed water, but the northern part, in the rainy season, becamebrackish and sometimes inundated the southern region with an invasionof destructive salty currents. So the people of the area built a ten-mile longstone and clay and masonry dike separating the lower third of the lakefrom the upper two-thirds, blocking the salt water when it appeared, butthroughan ingenious use of sluice gates-allowing the heavy water trafficon the lake to continue its rounds unobstructed by the lllassive levee wall.This southern part of the great lake thus became, as well as a thoroughfare,an immense fresh-water fish pond.In the middle of this fresh-water part of the lake there were two reedcoveredmud banks that the residents of the area over time had built upand developed into a single huge island as large as Manhattan, and uponthat island the people built a metropolis that became one of the largestcities in the world. With a conventionally estimated population of about350,000 residents by the end of the fifteenth century, this teeming Aztec