“The ladies will have a day or two of discomfort,” returned Coronado; “but you and I will see that they run no danger.”

Nine days after the arrival of the emigrants at Tegua they set out for the San Juan.  The wagons were left parked at the base of the butte under the care of the Moquis.  The expedition was reorganized as follows:  On horseback, Clara, Coronado, Thurstane, Texas Smith, and four Mexicans; on mules, Mrs. Stanley, Glover, the three Indian women, the four soldiers, and the ten drivers and muleteers.  There were besides eighteen burden mules loaded with provisions and other baggage.  In all, five women, twenty-two men, and forty-five animals.

The Moquis, to whom some stores and small presents were distributed, overflowed with hospitable offices.  The chief had a couple of sheep slaughtered for the travellers, and scores of women brought little baskets of meal, corn, guavas, etc.  As the strangers left the pueblo both sexes and all ages gathered on the landings, grouped about the stairways and ladders which led down the rampart, and followed for some distance along the declivity of the butte, holding out their simple offerings and urging acceptance.  Aunt Maria was more than ever in raptures with Moquis and women.

The chief and several others accompanied the cavalcade for eight or ten miles in order to set it on the right trail for the river.  But not one would volunteer as a guide; all shook their heads at the suggestion.  “Navajos!  Apaches!  Comanches!”

They had from the first advised against the expedition, and they now renewed their expostulations.  Scarcely any grass; no water except at long distances; a barren, difficult, dangerous country:  such was the meaning of their dumb show.  On the summit of a lofty bluff which commanded a vast view toward the north, they took their leave of the party, struck off in a rapid trot toward the pueblo, and never relaxed their speed until they were out of sight.

The adventurers now had under their eyes a large part of the region which they were about to traverse.  For several miles the landscape was rolling; then came elevated plateaux rising in successive steps, the most remote being apparently sixty miles away; and the colossal scene was bounded by isolated peaks, at a distance which could not be estimated with anything like accuracy.  Ranges, buttes, pinnacles, monumental crags, gullies, shadowy chasms, the beds of perished rivers, the stony wrecks left by unrecorded deluges, diversified this monstrous, sublime, and savage picture.  Only here and there, separated by vast intervals of barrenness, could be seen minute streaks of verdure.  In general the landscape was one of inhospitable sterility.  It could not be imagined by men accustomed only to fertile regions.  It seemed to have been taken from some planet not yet prepared for human, nor even for beastly habitation.  The emotion which it aroused was not that which usually springs from the contemplation of the larger aspects of nature.  It was not enthusiasm; it was aversion and despair.