His eyes somehow were fixed on mine, while he said quietly, “If there’s anybody here don’t like the grub, I’ll kick a lung out of him!” I was just about suggesting that a couple of pounds less saleratus in the bread and a couple of gallons less water in the coffee would be grateful to my Sybarite palate; but, after this conversation, I reflected that the fewer remarks I made the better would be the chances of my enjoying the rest of the trip; so I said nothing. Martin, I believe, is now in Chihuahua, and I assert from the depths of an outraged stomach, that a better man or a worse cook never thumped a mule or turned a flapjack. The march was continued down the San Bernardino until we reached its important affluent, the Bávispe, up which we made our way until the first signs of habitancy were encountered in the squalid villages of Bávispe, Basaraca, and Huachinera. The whole country was a desert. On each hand were the ruins of depopulated and abandoned hamlets, destroyed by the Apaches. The bottom-lands of the San Bernardino, once smiling with crops of wheat and barley, were now covered with a thickly-matted jungle of semi-tropical vegetation. The river banks were choked by dense brakes of cane of great size and thickness. The narrow valley was hemmed in by rugged and forbidding mountains, gashed and slashed with a thousand ravines, to cross which exhausted both strength and patience. The foot-hills were covered with _chevaux de frise_ of Spanish bayonet, mescal, and cactus. The lignum-vitæ flaunted its plumage of crimson flowers, much like the fuchsia, but growing in clusters. The grease-wood, ordinarily so homely, here assumed a garniture of creamy blossoms, rivaling the gaudy dahlia-like cups upon the nopal, and putting to shame the modest tendrils pendent from the branches of the mesquite. The sun glared down pitilessly, wearing out the poor mules, which had as much as they could do to scramble over the steep hills, composed of a nondescript accumulation of lava, sandstone, porphyry, and limestone, half-rounded by the action of water, and so loosely held together as to slip apart and roll away the instant the feet of animals or men touched them. When they were not slipping over loose stones or climbing rugged hills, they were breaking their way through jungles of thorny vegetation, which tore their quivering flesh. One of the mules, falling from the rocks, impaled itself upon a mesquite branch, and had to be killed.