William Hickling Prescott was an aristocratic Bostonian from the early 1800s who amused himself by writing histories of the Spanish Empire. He reads like a combination of Jane Austen and Indiana Jones. Here he describes the last days of an Aztec sacrificial victim:
from the Codex Maliabechiano (source: wikimedia commons)
“Four beautiful girls, bearing the names of the principal goddesses, were then selected to share the honours of his bed; and with them he continued to live in idle dalliance, feasted at the banquets of the principle nobles, who paid him all the honors of a divinity.
“At length the fatal day of sacrifice arrived. The term of his short-lived glories was at an end. He was stripped of his gaudy apparel, and bade adieu to the fair partners of his revelries. One of the royal barges transported him across the lake to a temple which rose on its margin, about a league from the city. Continue reading
