As he hurried back to the Casa Grande he tried to devise some method of saving this unfortunate.  A rescue was impossible, for the savages were numerous, watchful, and merciless, and in case they were likely to lose her they would brain her.  But she might be ransomed:  blankets, clothing, and perhaps a beast or two could be spared for that purpose; the gold pieces that he had in his waist-belt should all go of course.  The great fear was lest the brutes should find all bribes poor compared with the joys of a torture dance.  Querying how he could hide this horrible affair from Clara, and shuddering at the thought that but for favoring chances she might have shared the fate of Pepita he ran on toward the Casa, waving his hand cheerfully to the two women on the roof Meantime Clara had been attending to her housekeeping and Mrs. Stanley had been attending to her feelings.  The elder lady (we dare not yet call her an old lady) was in the lowest spirits.  She tried to brace herself; she crossed her hands behind her back, man-fashion; she marched up and down the roof man-fashion.  All useless; the transformation didn’t work; or, if she was a man, she was a scared one.

She could not help feeling like one of the spirits in prison as she glanced at the awful solitude around her.  Notwithstanding the river, there still was the desert.  The little plain was but an oasis.  Two miles to the east the San Juan burst out of a defile of sandstone, and a mile to the west it disappeared in a similar chasm.  The walls of these gorges rose abruptly two thousand feet above the hurrying waters.  All around were the monstrous, arid, herbless, savage, cruel ramparts of the plateau.  No outlook anywhere; the longest reach of the eye was not five miles; then came towering precipices.  The travellers were like ants gathered on an inch of earth at the bottom of a fissure in a quarry.  The horizon was elevated and limited, resting everywhere on harsh lines of rock which were at once near the spectator and far above him.  The overhanging plateaux strove to shut him out from the sight of heaven.

What variety there was in the grim monotony appeared in shapes that were horrible to the weary and sorrowful.  On the other side of the San Juan towered an assemblage of pinnacles which looked like statues; but these statues were a thousand feet above the stream, and the smallest of them was at least four hundred feet high.  To a lost wanderer, and especially to a dispirited woman, such magnitude was not sublime, but terrifying.  It seemed as if these shapes were gods who had no mercy, or demons who were full of malevolence.  Still higher, on a jutting crag which overhung the black river, was a castle a hundred fold huger than man ever built, with ramparts that were dizzy precipices and towers such as no daring could scale.  It faced the horrible group of stony deities as if it were their pandemonium.