On looking at it closely we perceive that it represents an ogre of horrid mien with a death-head grin and formidable teeth, his hair wild and long, the locks falling down upon the neck; and suspended on the breast as an ornament is the bone of a human lower jaw with its incisor teeth. The left leg is thrown forward as in the act of walking, and the arms are uplifted, the hands open, and the fingers extended, as at the moment of seizing the prey or the victim. The lines about the umbilicus represent the knot of the girdle which supported the _maxtli_ or breech-cloth.
There is no doubt as to which personage of the Aztec pantheon this fear-inspiring figure represents; it is _Tzontemoc Mictlantecutli_, “the Lord of the Realm of the Dead, He of the Falling Hair,” the dread god of death and the dead.[254] His distinctive marks are there, the death-head, the falling hair, the jaw bone, the terrible aspect, the giant size.
There can be no question but that the _Piedra de los Gigantes_ establishes a date of death; that it is a necrological tablet, a mortuary monument, and from its size and workmanship, that it was intended as a memorial of the decease of some very important personage in ancient Mexico.
Provided with these deductions from the stone itself, let us turn to the records of old Mexico and see if they corroborate the opinion stated. Fortunately we possess several of these venerable documents, chronicles of the empire before Cortes destroyed it, written in the hieroglyphs which the inventive genius of the natives had devised. Taking two of these chronicles, the one known as the _Codex Telleriano-Remensis_, the other as the _Codex Vaticanus_,[255] and turning to the year numbered “ten” under the sign of the rabbit, I find that both present the same record, which I copy in the following figure.
FIG. 2. Extract from the Vatican Codex. ]
You will observe the sign of the year, the rabbit, shown merely by his head for brevity. The ten dots which give its number are beside it. Immediately beneath is a curious quadruped with what are intended as water-drops dripping from him. The animal is the hedge-hog and the figure is to be construed _iconomatically_, that is, it must be read as a rebus through the medium of the Nahuatl language. In that language water is _atl_, in composition _a_, and hedge-hog is _uitzotl_. Combine these and you get _ahuitzotl_, or, with the reverential termination, _ahuitzotzin_. This was the name of the ruler or emperor, if you allow the word, of ancient Mexico before the accession to the throne of that Montezuma whom the Spanish _conquistador_ Cortes put to death. His hieroglyph, as I have described it, is well known in Mexican codices.[256]