Pizarro and his party, deserted in the wilderness, unable to advance farther, had no alternative but to remain, or retrace their miserable way to Quito, the place they had started from more than a year before. They chose the latter, and commenced their return march with heavy hearts. They took a more northerly route than that by which they had approached the Amazon; and, though it was attended with fewer difficulties, they experienced yet greater distresses, from their greater inability to overcome them. Their only food was such scanty fare as they could pick up in the forest, or happily meet with in some forsaken Indian settlement, or wring by violence from the natives. Some sickened and sank down by the way, and perished where they fell; for there was none to help them. Intense misery had made them selfish; and many a poor wretch was abandoned to his fate, to die alone in the wilderness, or, more probably, to be devoured, while living, by the wild animals which roamed over it. It took them a year to measure back their way to Quito; and the miseries they had endured were testified to by their appearance when they arrived, in sadly reduced numbers, at the place of their starting. Their horses gone, their arms broken and rusted, the skins of wild animals their only clothes, their long and matted locks streaming wildly down their shoulders, their faces blackened by the tropical sun, their bodies wasted by famine and disfigured by scars, it seemed as if the charnel-house had given up its dead, as, with unsteady step, they crept slowly onwards. More than half of the four thousand Indians who had accompanied the expedition had perished; and of the Spaniards, only eighty, and many of these irretrievably broken in constitution, found their way back to Quito. Meanwhile, Orellana glided down the stream, which then was nameless and unknown, but which has since been called by his name, though it is more generally known by a name derived from a story which Orellana told, in his account of his voyage, of a nation of Amazons inhabiting its banks. But an account of Orellana's adventures must be reserved for our next chapter. CHAPTER II. ORELLANA DESCENDS THE RIVER.