At bottom, the ancient Mexicans had no confidence in the future, their fragile world was perpetually at the mercy of some disaster: there were not only the natural cataclysms and the famines, but more than that, on certain nights the monstrous divinities of the west appeared at the crossroads , and there were the wizards, those dark envoys from a misterious world, and every 52 years there was a great fear that fell upon all the nations of the empire when the sun set on the last day of the century and no man could tell whether it would rise again.