The Conquest of Mexico volume 2

VOLUME TWO As the drama of The Conquest of Mexico shaped itself, Prescott set the stage with a panorama of Montezuma's empire. From the moment when Cortez, burning his boats and landing at Vera Cruz, begai his march to the capital, this story moves on to its final result with the frightful inevitability of sonic drawn of nature. The Aztecs, like the Incas in The Conquest of Peru, the work that rapidly followed, were painted as the chroniclers had seen them. Generations passed before anyone challenged the truth of the picture that Prescott drew of the conquest, grandly in the Mexico book, only less grandly in the tale of Peru. Everything that Prescott wrote had the same solidity, and he told these two great stories with an air of effortless ease. Massive but alive in all their parts, they were full of colour and vigorous movement. They were partly composed on horseback. Prescott mentally wrote the final chapter in a gallop through the woods at Pepperell, near Alabama in North Massachusetts. But how could a half-blind man write a history, based on unpublished documents in several foreign languages ? With the aid of a friend and a sister and later of a competent secretary, he made his ears do the work of his eyes. He taught himself to use a noctograph, by means of which, with the aid of an ivory stylus, pressing on a sheet of carbon-paper, he took his notes and wrote his manuscripts.