Word: aztec
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When the ragged and exhausted Spanish conquistadors first beheld the lake-encircled capital of the Aztecs one November morning in 1519, they were stunned by its grandeur. A shining metropolis of some 300,000 people, far larger than any city in Europe, Tenochtitlan displayed immense stone temples to the gods of rain and war and an even more immense royal palace, where Aztec nobles stood guard in jaguar-head helmets and brightly feathered robes...
...various symptoms of Mexico City's illness all work on and worsen one another. But the one problem that underlies all the others is the extraordinary growth in population. The Aztec capital known as Tenochtitlán, with its lakes and flower gardens (and an efficient sewage system), was depopulated by a smallpox epidemic in 1520, which killed more than 80% of all the Indians who survived the Spanish invasion. Mexico City did not reach the 2 million mark until after World War II. But then a systematic national policy of urban industrialization helped send the figures soaring...
...curse bequeathed to Mexico City by the Aztecs was the curse of human sacrifice. That ritual, in which a priest bent over the recumbent victim and cut out his throbbing heart with an obsidian knife, was central to the Aztecs' religion. The war god Huitzilopochtli required blood as the price of Aztec victory and the rain god Tlaloc required it as the price of the harvest; if these gods remained unpropitiated, the world would end. Exactly how many victims were thus sacrificed (and later eaten) remains uncertain, but it is believed that 20,000 prisoners were offered...
Mexico is a place where worlds come and go, sometimes sinking out of sight. In the 16th century, Cortés obliterated the Aztec culture in one of history's more thorough conquests. But 200 years before that, the Aztecs had built their own civilization near the ruins of an earlier, forgotten people. To this day, Mexicans are haunted by the ever present fear of still another apocalypse, and there is enough bad news in their economy at present to keep the specter alive...
...Pompeii may have more luck with the gummy red spaceship that moves around the outskirts of Duluth. It contains a race of highly competent centipedes who can change themselves into beautiful women or Hubert Humphrey. The aliens do not threaten the commonweal nearly as much as do the Aztec Terrorists Society, a black drug dealer named Big John and Police Lieutenant Darlene Ecks, who enjoys strip-searching suspects...