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Sculpting the landscape, the Aztecs created a beautiful ideal model, intended to bring rain to the real world. Water channel from the mountain through an aqueduct flowed around the hill, filling baths and basins and shrines along the way. Walkways followed the channels, paths for ritual processions by priests and rulers.
This paradise garden of flowing water is an extraordinary testimony to the skills and beliefs of its architects. Above this shrine, a temple celebrates the poet ruler who conceived this place. Higher still, a temple honors the Rain God. Corn or maize Goddesses were cut into the rock to ensure the fertility of the land.
The terraces below were once covered with plants and trees, some brought from the farthest ends of the empire. The Aztecs had a remarkable knowledge of horticulture, experimenting in these gardens with species new to the Valley of Mexico. They were also renowned herbalists and healers. But all their healing wisdom and all their offerings to the gods would be powerless against the disaster which was to come.
Over a year before the Spaniards arrived in 1519, according to Aztec records, a series of omens warned of an impending catastrophe: the temple of the warrior god of the Sun suddenly burst into flames. Comets and lightning followed and the ruler of the time Moctezuma had a vision: people coming as conquerors and riding on deer.
Marco Polo had been to China. Vasco da Gama had discovered the route to the Cape. The continent was in ferment and movement whereas the Mexican world was extremely closed in, it was absolutely, hermetically closed. So that the arrival of the Spaniards must have been like the arrival of people from Mars, to us it would be today, totally unsuspected aliens, totally unsuspected aliens. The shock must be profound, I think, it's one of the reasons that explains the downfall of the Aztec empire. In a sense I think the Aztec empire died of astonishment more than anything else.
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aqueduct: n. 沟渠
horticulture: n. 园艺；园艺学
herbalist: n. 草药医生
ferment: n. 动荡
hermetically: adv. 封闭地
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