Nevertheless, by degrees they fell into a silence, partly the effect of the strangely enervating air.  The fog had completely risen from the landscape, and hung high in mid-air, through which an intense sun, shorn of its fierceness, diffused a lambent warmth, and a yellowish, unctuous light, as if it had passed through amber.  The bay gleamed clearly and distinctly; not a shadow flecked its surface to the gray impenetrable rampart of fog that stretched like a granite wall before its entrance.  On one side of the narrow road billows of monstrous grain undulated to the crest of the low hills, that looked like larger undulations of the soil, furrowed by bosky canadas or shining arroyos.  Banks was startled into a burst of professional admiration.

“There’s enough grain there to feed a thousand Todos Santos; and raised, too, with tools like that,” he continued, pointing to a primitive plow that lay on the wayside, formed by a single forked root.  A passing ox-cart, whose creaking wheels were made of a solid circle of wood, apparently sawn from an ordinary log, again plunged him into cogitation.  Here and there little areas of the rudest cultivation broke into a luxuriousness of orange, lime, and fig trees.  The joyous earth at the slightest provocation seemed to smile and dimple with fruit and flowers.  Everywhere the rare beatitudes of Todos Santos revealed and repeated its simple story.  The fructifying influence of earth and sky; the intervention of a vaporous veil between a fiery sun and fiery soil; the combination of heat and moisture, purified of feverish exhalations, and made sweet and wholesome by the saline breath of the mighty sea, had been the beneficent legacy of their isolation, the munificent compensation of their oblivion.

A gradual and gentle ascent at the end of two hours brought the cavalcade to a halt upon a rugged upland with semi-tropical shrubbery, and here and there larger trees from the tierra templada in the evergreens or madrono.  A few low huts and corrals, and a rambling hacienda, were scattered along the crest, and in the midst arose a little votive chapel, flanked by pear-trees.  Near the roadside were the crumbling edges of some long-forgotten excavation.  Crosby gazed at it curiously.  Touching the arm of the officer, he pointed to it.

“Una mina de plata,” said the officer sententiously.

“A mine of some kind—­silver, I bet!” said Crosby, turning to the others.  “Is it good—­bueno—­you know?” he continued to the officer, with vague gesticulations.

“En tiempos pasados,” returned the officer gravely.

“I wonder what that means?” said Winslow.

But before Crosby could question further, the subaltern signaled to them to dismount.  They did so, and their horses were led away to a little declivity, whence came the sound of running water.  Left to themselves, the Americans looked around them.  The cavalcade seemed to have halted near the edge of a precipitous ridge, the evident termination of the road.  But the view that here met their eyes was unexpected and startling.