[Illustration: VIEW OF RUINED TOLTEC PALACE.]
The building we unearthed is entire, its outer wall intact; presenting a valuable specimen of the houses dating long before the Conquest. Here we found the same kind of objects as in our first excavations: plates, dishes, three-footed cups having striated bottoms and used for grinding Chili pepper; fragments of pottery, enamels, terra-cotta whorls of different size covered with sunk designs having a hole in the centre. These whorls are called “_malacates_” by the natives, and used by Indian women to this day. A round piece of wood or spindle-stick is introduced in the hole of the whorl, projecting about five inches from the lower plane, and about nine inches from the upper. The spinner, who is sitting, rests the point of her spindle on a varnished plate, and impels it round with her thumb and forefinger, twisting the cotton or wool attached thereto.[54] In Mexico, rich ladies used a golden plate.[55]
The edifice No. 7 is undoubtedly a tennis-court, for it answers exactly the description given by historians of such structures; moreover, I found one of the rings still in place. Veytia is wrong, therefore, in crediting the Mexicans with the invention of the game; were it so we should not have found a tennis-court at Chichen-Itza. Mendieta[56] relates how Tezacatlipoca came down from his celestial abode on a spider’s ladder, and how in his long peregrinations on earth he visited Tula, brought thither by his jealousy of Quetzalcoatl, whom he challenged to play tennis; but the latter turning into a tiger discomfited him utterly. The spectators were so terrified that they fled, and in the tumult which ensued many were drowned _in the river flowing close by_.
This tradition shows plainly that tennis existed in the remote period of Quetzalcoatl’s rule at Tula; that the game was of Toltec origin, that the court was on the hill, since the spectators in their precipitancy to run away were drowned, that Quetzalcoatl was a good tennis-player, and that the expression, “he was turned into a tiger,” is merely honorific, applied to him on the spot for having sent his ball through the ring. This passage also explains the tiger frieze over the tennis-court at Chichen-Itza.