Hard Travel in the Wilderness for Fifteen Days. "In those fifteen days that we traveled in a northwesterly direction, we met with many _akalchees_, or swamps, which consist of very bad passages through water and low and thorny shrubs with a kind of square grass, which, if it caught our clothes, held us by the multitude of thorns, which grow on the four corners from top to bottom; and if it caught our face, hands or legs, it cut them like a small saw; so that as most of the woods are _akalchees_, which consist of this grass, except on the high places, we were always walking with our feet, hands or faces wounded, so that we did not know what to do. Thus wounded, we went through some very long _akalchees_, when we directed one of the Indians whom we brought, to climb a tree so as to look out and see where we could make a short cut through the said _akalche_, for we were not able to suffer any longer on account of the many sores which the said grass caused us. This said Indian climbed the tree, and gave us the news that he had discovered a great meadow or plain towards the northwest. Some instinct made me believe it, but to see whether imagination and the wish we had to find it, had this effect, we took that direction, so that in a little while we came upon the said meadow; but as we entered it, at the beginning it had half a yard of water; we went ploughing through it and at each step there was more water, and it took a long time to cross it, causing us pain enough in our wounds. But with the care that we took not to get submerged, we forgot that feeling, since the earth of the said marsh was so spongy that though we doubled up the reeds which grew there in large number, so as to step over it, so that the water might hold us up, yet if we stopped a moment, the overflowed earth drew and sucked us in in such a way, that if we should fall, we could not help one another, since he who should stop to help the other, would be submerged with him."