The grass was short. The sun scorched and there was nothing to drink. We had forgotten to lay in our usual supply of oranges. We wandered about, guided by the sun and trying to keep to the correct general direction. Palm trees are not close together like the trees of a northern forest, but at a certain distance their white trunks bank into a solid wall. Always, it seemed, we were in the middle of a large, white-paled arena. Here, also, Rogelio pointed out to us the flat-topped guao tree, which is dreaded by the natives because of the popular belief that to rest in its shadow means sleep and death. After awhile we hit a sandy trail which had been the bed of some long since dried-out river. It was seamed in a thousand directions by the draining off of recent rains. We welcomed the approach of the first person we had met since morning, a horse-back rider who appeared to be honestly familiar with the country and who led us, once more, to the trail we had lost. We encountered more tall grass. To a spectator, the car must have looked like some big, black beast, wallowing along in boundless marsh. A deep blue ridge in the east betokened mountains. We were in a valley. That afternoon we forded nine shallow rivers and rushed innumerable short steep climbs up their farther banks. Some of these grades seemed to stand the car on end, both going down and coming up. At many of them we were forced to stop and cut out notches in the hard clay or solid rock, to clear the fly wheel, when the car should go up over the sharp crown of the hill. At a small, isolated grocery store, where we stopped for oranges, we learned that we had missed San Domingo, our immediate objective point, by many miles, and so struck directly eastward for Esperanza. It was discouraging information, for we had not eaten at all that day. We were fighting hard and our mettle was improving. We had long since dropped the habit of anxiety that had shadowed our efforts on the first two days. We kept on going lower and lower into the valley. The valley became muddier and muddier. We crossed quagmires by the score, some of them by following a carefully planned route over solid spots. Others we crossed by making a rough causeway of brush and any broken trees and limbs which we could find. Still others, whose bottoms, by probing with a stick, we found to be made of hard rock, we took by “shooting”—which means driving full tilt straight through the mud and water. “Shooting” became a common pastime with us and a by-word. At every mire one of us would run ahead of the car, size it up or investigate, and yell back the directions to “shoot her” or to get out and help build a floating bridge of brush. [Illustration: “_The valley became muddier and muddier._” SEE PAGE 66.]