[Anahuac by Edward Burnett Tylor]@TWC D-Link bookAnahuac CHAPTER VI 13/47
The Indians have a great fancy for making crosses, and the aloe lends itself particularly to this kind of decoration.
They have only to cut off six or eight inches of one leaf, and impale the piece on the sharp point of another, and the cross is made.
Every good-sized aloe has two or three of these primitive religious emblems upon it. Several little torrent-beds crossed the road, and over them were thrown old-fashioned Spanish stone bridges, as steep as the Rialto, or the bridge on the willow-patterned plates. Before going to see the pyramids, we visited the caves in the hill-side not far from them, whence the stone was brought to build them.
It is _tetzontli_, the porous amygdaloid which abounds among the porphyritic hills, a beautiful building-stone, easily worked, and durable.
There was a large space that seemed to have been quarried out bodily, and into this opened numerous caves.
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