Jose, awakened by the report, reached the spot only in time to chide the muleteer for wasting powder and ball in a contest with one whom a single ave would have been sufficient to utterly discomfit.  What further reliance he placed on Ignacio’s story is not known; but, in commemoration of a worthy Californian custom, the place was called La Canada de la Tentacion del Pio Muletero, or “The Glen of the Temptation of the Pious Muleteer,” a name which it retains to this day.

The next morning, the party, issuing from a narrow gorge, came upon a long valley, sear and burnt with the shadeless heat.  Its lower extremity was lost in a fading line of low hills, which, gathering might and volume toward the upper end of the valley, upheaved a stupendous bulwark against the breezy North.  The peak of this awful spur was just touched by a fleecy cloud that shifted to and fro like a banneret.  Father Jose gazed with mingled awe and admiration.  By a singular coincidence, the muleteer Ignacio uttered the simple ejaculation, “Diablo!”

As they penetrated the valley, they soon began to miss the agreeable life and companionable echoes of the canon they had quitted.  Huge fissures in the parched soil seemed to gape as with thirsty mouths.  A few squirrels darted from the earth, and disappeared as mysteriously before the jingling mules.  A gray wolf trotted leisurely along just ahead.  But whichever way Father Jose turned, the mountain always asserted itself and arrested his wandering eye.  Out of the dry and arid valley, it seemed to spring into cooler and bracing life.  Deep cavernous shadows dwelt along its base; rocky fastnesses appeared midway of its elevation; and on either side huge black hills diverged like massy roots from a central trunk.  His lively fancy pictured these hills peopled with a majestic and intelligent race of savages; and looking into futurity, he already saw a monstrous cross crowning the dome-like summit.  Far different were the sensations of the muleteer, who saw in those awful solitudes only fiery dragons, colossal bears, and break-neck trails.  The converts, Concepcion and Incarnation, trotting modestly beside the Padre, recognized, perhaps, some manifestation of their former weird mythology.

At nightfall they reached the base of the mountain.  Here Father Jose unpacked his mules, said vespers, and, formally ringing his bell, called upon the Gentiles within hearing to come and accept the Holy Faith.  The echoes of the black frowning hills around him caught up the pious invitation, and repeated it at intervals; but no Gentiles appeared that night.  Nor were the devotions of the muleteer again disturbed, although he afterward asserted, that, when the Father’s exhortation was ended, a mocking peal of laughter came from the mountain.  Nothing daunted by these intimations of the near hostility of the Evil One, Father Jose declared his intention to ascend the mountain at early dawn; and before the sun rose the next morning he was leading the way.