We think that near the coast by way of those towns through which we came are more than a thousand leagues of inhabited country, plentiful of subsistence.  Three times the year it is planted with maize and beans.  Deer are of three kinds; one the size of the young steer of Spain.  There are innumerable houses, such as are called bahios.  They have poison from a certain tree the size of the apple.  For effect no more is necessary than to pluck the fruit and moisten the arrow with it, or, if there be no fruit, to break a twig and with the milk do the like.  The tree is abundant, and so deadly that, if the leaves be bruised and steeped in some neighboring water, the deer and other animals drinking it soon burst.

We were in this town three days.  A day’s journey farther was another town, at which the rain fell heavily while we were there, and the river became so swollen we could not cross it, which detained us fifteen days.  In this time Castillo saw the buckle of a sword-belt on the neck of an Indian, and stitched to it the nail of a horseshoe.  He took them, and we asked the native what they were:  he answered that they came from heaven.  We questioned him further, as to who had brought them thence:  they all responded that certain men who wore beards like us had come from heaven and arrived at that river, bringing horses, lances, and swords, and that they had lanced two Indians.  In a manner of the utmost indifference we could feign, we asked them what had become of those men.  They answered that they had gone to sea, putting their lances beneath the water, and going themselves also under the water:  afterward that they were seen on the surface going toward the sunset.  For this we gave many thanks to God our Lord.  We had before despaired of ever hearing more of Christians.  Even yet we were left in great doubt and anxiety, thinking those people were merely persons who had come by sea on discoveries.  However, as we had now such exact information, we made greater speed, and, as we advanced on our way, the news of the Christians continually grew.  We told the natives that we were going in search of that people, to order them not to kill nor make slaves of them, nor take them from their lands, nor do other injustice.  Of this the Indians were very glad.

We passed through many territories and found them all vacant; their inhabitants wandered fleeing among the mountains, without daring to have houses or till the earth for fear of Christians.  The sight was one of infinite pain to us, a land very fertile and beautiful, abounding in springs and streams, the hamlets deserted and burned, the people thin and weak, all fleeing or in concealment.  As they did not plant, they appeased their keen hunger by eating roots and the bark of trees.  We bore a share in the famine along the whole way; for poorly could these unfortunates provide for us, themselves being so reduced they looked as tho they would willingly die.  They brought shawls of those they had concealed because of the