mark one exact Indian century of difference, which is a reason for conjecture; but Chavero, exhausting the chronological analysis, fixes the date: it was in 1116, the year 5513 of the Indians. Here we repeat again that these slight discrepancies manifest the fundamental exactness of the data; at all events, if the event was hastened or retarded slightly, the aborigines in accordance with their custom, accommodated it in their annals to the great sacred cycles.
Ah well, the Aztecs themselves had commenced their peregrination about the year 1064 of our era (5460 of their calendar), a fact supported by Gama with data of the native writers Tezozómoc and Chimalpahin; Veytia, too, inclines to that date. There has been much discrepancy between authors with reference to this; but the monolith demonstrates that the date is correct, confirming incidentally the legitimacy of one of the most important documents of our archaeology, the Tira de la Peregrinación. In this codex, 183 years are counted from the time of exodus from Aztlan until the making of the new fire at the station of Chapultepec. The same appears in the Anaglifo or Codex Aubin, this precise accord between pieces completely independent corroborating the exactness of the date. The date named (that of the new fire kindled at Chapultepec) has been determined by Don Alfredo Chavero: the event took place about 1247; the beginning of the journey, 183 years earlier, was consequently in 1064, Ce técpatl. Well, from then to 1479 there passed just 416 years, if we include the one that served as starting-point. There results one grand cycle completed between the two events.
What stronger reason for the commemoration than that one of those grand periods at the end of which the natives awaited the destruction of the world had happily ended? It may he assumed that the stone was prepared in good season before so solemn a festival. A suggestive incident supports this supposition: according to Durán's account, the relic completed on the date inscribed in the tablet was not inaugurated until one or two years later. It is easy to think that Axayácatl would await the fulfilment of the prophecies, and until priests and people were convinced that no calamity occurred, when they resolved to celebrate the festival—the greatest that their annals record—in which they sacrificed an enormous number of victims as thank-offering to the gods who prolonged their existence.
There exists another date which seems interesting to us. The Tellerian-Remense Codex as well as the Vatican Codex 3738 have the year 1419 marked by a highly conventionalized arboreal design, which
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