Orders were therefore sent to Junot to transfer his base of operations from Salamanca to Alcantara, and to march down the Tagus. The Spaniards (according to their orders) had collected the magazines for feeding Junot’s force at Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo. But for that Napoleon cared little. He wrote that the army must take the shortest road at all costs, whatever the difficulty of getting supplies. ‘I will not have the march of the army delayed for a single day,’ he added; ‘20,000 men can feed themselves anywhere, even in a desert.’ It was indeed a desert that Junot was ordered to cross: the hill-road from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara, which hugs the Portuguese frontier, has hardly a village on it; it crosses ridge after ridge, ravine after ravine. In November the rains had just set in, and every torrent was full. Over this stony wilderness, by the Pass of Perales, the French army rushed in five days, but at the cost of dreadful privations. When it reached Alcantara half the horses had perished of cold, all the guns but six had been left behind, stranded at various points on the road, and of the infantry more than a quarter was missing--the famished men having scattered in all directions to find food. If there had been a Portuguese force watching Alcantara, Junot must have waited for many days to get his army together again, all the more so because every cartridge that his men were carrying had been spoiled by the wet. But there were no enemies near; Junot found at the great Tagus bridge only a few Spanish battalions and guns on the way to join his army. Confiscating their munitions to fill his men’s pouches, and their food to provide them with two days’ rations, Junot rushed on again upon the 19th of November. He found, to his surprise, that there was no road suitable for wheeled traffic along the Tagus valley, but only a poor track running along the foot of the mountains to Castello Branco, the sole Portuguese town in this part of the frontier. The march from Alcantara to Abrantes proved even more trying than that from Ciudad Rodrigo to Alcantara. It was through a treeless wilderness of grey granite, seamed with countless ravines. The rain continued, the torrents were even fuller than before, the country even more desolate than the Spanish side of the border. It was only after terrible sufferings that the head of the column reached Abrantes on November 23: the rear trailed in on the 26th. All the guns except four Spanish pieces of horse artillery had fallen behind: the cavalry was practically dismounted. Half the infantry was marauding off the road, or resting dead-beat in the few poor villages that it had passed. If there had been even 5,000 Portuguese troops at Abrantes the French would have been brought to a stop. But instead of hostile battalions, Junot found there only an anxious diplomatist, named Barreto, sent by the Prince-Regent to stop his advance by offers of servile submission to the Emperor and proffers of tribute.