eemed as if the party must perish. Coronado went
at his work, so to speak, head foremost and with his hat over his eyes.
Nevertheless, when it came to the details of his mad enterprise, he
managed them admirably. He was energetic, indefatigable, courageous,
cheerful. All day he was hurrying the cavalcade, and yet watching its
ability to endure. His "Forward, forward," alternated with his "Carefully,
carefully." Now "_Adelante_" and now "_Con juicio_"

About two in the afternoon they reached a little nook of sparse grass,
which the beasts gnawed perfectly bare in half an hour. No water; the
horses were uselessly jaded in searching for it; beds of trap and gullies
of ancient rivers were explored in vain; the horrible rocky wilderness was
as dry as a bone. Meanwhile, the fatigue of scrambling and stumbling thus
far had been enormous. It had been necessary to ascend plateau after
plateau by sinuous and crumbling ledges, which at a distance looked
impracticable to goats. More than once, in face of some beetling
precipice, or on the brink of some gaping chasm, it seemed as if the
journey had come to an end. Long detours had to be made in order to
connect points which were only separated by slight intervals. The whole
region was seamed by the jagged zigzags of canons worn by rivers which had
flowed for thousands of years, and then for thousands of years more had
been non-existent. If, at the commencement of one of these mighty grooves,
you took the wrong side, you could not regain the trail without returning
to the point of error, for crossing was impossible.

A trail there was. It is by this route that the Utes and Payoches of the
Colorado come to trade with the Moquis or to plunder them. But, as may be
supposed, it is a journey which is not often made even by savages; and the
cavalcade, throughout the whole of its desperate push, did not meet a
human being. Amid the monstrous expanse of uninhabited rock it seemed lost
beyond assistance, forsaken and cast out by mankind, doomed to a death
which was to have no spectator. Could you have seen it, you would have
thought of a train of ants endeavoring to cross a quarry; and you would
have judged that the struggle could only end in starvation, or in some
swifter destruction.

The most desperate venture of the travellers was amid the wrecks of an
extinct volcano. It seemed here as if the genius of fire had striven to
outdo the grotesque extravagances of the genii of the waters. Cra