Eager now, Fray Marcos started ahead. Soon he met with Indians wearing fine turquoises in their ears and noses, or on their waist belts. These folk, eager to see the strangers pass on, told of houses farther north that had their doorways studded with gold and turquoises. To the infinite embarrassment of the friar, gifts of this stone and of skins, such as served the natives for raiment, were pressed upon him. Other Indians that were met wandering inland from the seacoast, talked of pearls that could be gathered in quantity. Estévan had been told to wait for Fray Marcos. Instead he pressed on down the San Pedro valley. In Cíbola he excited the anger of the native population, probably by posing as a great medicine man and using, very likely, the gourds or rattles of a hostile tribe. According to the Zuñi legend, he was taken beyond the pueblo precincts and there given “a powerful kick which sped him through the air back to the south whence he came.”[37] When the friar arrived late in May (1539) within sight of the first of the Seven Cities of Cíbola he found the inhabitants in no mood to receive another alien visitor, and, like Moses, forbidden to enter the promised land, he could but look into it from a near-by eminence on the south. Alone, and unarmed, he had no other choice than to turn back, thankful, no doubt, to escape from death himself, since he was known to be the responsible chief of Estévan. By hasty marches, “with far more fright than food,” the friar reached New Spain once more. There he reported to the viceroy all that he had seen. What is more valuable, he scrupulously differentiated between this and what he had been told of treasures in the region beyond. The Zuñis still talk of the “Black Mexican” and point out K’iakima, a ruin on a bluff at the southwest angle of To-yo-ál-a-na (Thunder Mountain) as the place of his murder. Hodge, who has followed Cushing[38] in very careful and important work at Zuñi, is satisfied that Háwikuh was the village first seen by Estévan and that there he met his death; also that it “was the city of Cíbola rising from the plains which Niza and his Piman guides viewed from the southern heights in 1539; moreover that it was the pueblo which Coronado stormed in the summer of the following year, seems indisputable.”[39]