If he were of a philosophical turn of mind, he might have said that in order for the central valley to have such peace and space for their art, then the chaos of warfare and the predicament of hunger had to be expelled to the distant villages of strangers whom he himself would never see. Thus it had always been, and thus it would always be: the residents of great cities almost never saw the vulnerable, shattered peoples in distant lands who supported them—except briefly, in an almost unreal sense, as honored sacrifice victims in magisterial ceremonies. The people who lived in Tenochtitlan were
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