The truth is, that his circumstances were too mighty for him.  He had launched them, but he could not steer them as he would, and they were carrying him he knew not whither.  At one o’clock he awoke Texas Smith, who was now his sergeant of the guard; but instead of enjoining some instant atrocity upon him, as he had more than once that night purposed, he merely passed the ordinary instructions of the watch; then, rolling himself in his blankets, he fell asleep as quickly and calmly as an infant.

At daybreak commenced another struggle with the desert.  It was still sixty miles to the San Juan, over a series of savage sandstone plateaux, said to be entirely destitute of water.  If the animals could not accomplish the distance in two days, it seemed 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.