Through most of this day we struggled with a difficult if fantastically beautiful country.  Where rock outcropped and in the sands of bright rapid streams we looked for signs of that gold, so stressed as though it were the only salvation!  But the rocks were silent, and though in the bed of a shrunken streamlet we found some glistening particles and scraping them carefully together got a small spoonful to wrap in cloth and bestow in our pouch of treasures, still were we not sure that it was wholly gold.  It might be.  We worked for an hour for just this pinch.

Since yesterday morning our path had been perfectly solitary.  Then suddenly, when we were, we thought, six leagues at least from the ships, the way turning and entering a small green dell, we came upon three Indians seated resting, their backs to palm trees.  We halted, they raised their eyes.  They stared, they rose in amazement at the sight of those gods, Roderigo Jerez, Luis Torres and Juan Lepe.  They stood like statues with great eyes and parted lips.  For us, coming silently upon them, we had too our moment of astonishment.

They were three copper men, naked, fairly tall and well to look at.  But each had between his lips what seemed a brown stick, burning at the far end, dropping a light ash and sending up a thin cloud of odorous smoke.  These burning sticks they dropped as they rose.  They had seemed so silent, so contented, so happy, sitting there with backs to trees, a firebrand in each mouth, I felt a love for them!  Luis thought the lighted sticks some rite of their religion, but after a while when we came to examine them, we found them not true stick, but some large, thickish brown leaf tightly twisted and pressed together and having a pungent, not unpleasing odor.  We crumbled one in our hands and tasted it.  The taste was also pungent, strange, but one might grow to like it.  They called the stick tobacco, and said they always used it thus with fire, drinking in the smoke and puffing it out again as they showed us through the nostrils.  We thought it a great curiosity, and so it was!

But to them we were unearthly beings.  The men from the sea told of us, then as it were introduced Diego Colon, who spoke proudly with appropriate gesture, loving always his part of herald Mercury—­or rather of herald Mercury’s herald—­not assuming to be god himself, but cherishing the divine efflux and the importance it rayed upon him!

The three Indians quivered with a sense of the great adventure!  Their town was yonder.  They themselves had been on the path to such and such a place, but now would they turn and go with us, and when we went again to the sea they, if it were permitted, would accompany us and view for themselves our amazing canoes!  All this to our companion.  They backed with great deference from us.