Gonzalo Pizarro, setting out once more from a valley where he had halted, came to a deep river, the _Napo_, which it was necessary for him to cross. Its narrowest breadth was twenty feet, and the banks were precipitous, and some two hundred fathoms in height. His men succeeded in laying a beam across, and in traversing this bridge of _Al Sirath_, one soldier fell into the hell beneath. The others proceeded, through marshes and by swamps and lakes, until their provisions were expended. On the river’s banks they determined to construct a raft which might support the sick and convey the whole party from the one bank to the other as occasion might seem to render prudent. The bits and stirrups of the horses’ harness supplied nails for the raft; the forest furnished gum in place of pitch, and the garments of the soldiers were used instead of oakum. The vessel thus constructed conveyed the sick and the stores, while the main body of the expedition followed on foot the course of the stream, through thickets, caves, plantations, and inundated fields. Gonzalo Pizarro would have belied his name had he not strewed his track with mementoes of his cruelty. Whether or not the chiefs of the tribes by which he passed received him well, their inevitable fate was to be carried along with him, although he observed a distinction between such as had given him a friendly welcome and such as had not, by placing only the latter in chains. But one day these _caciques_--the chained as well as the unchained--took the opportunity of leaping into the river, thinking the risk of death preferable to the tender mercies of a Pizarro. By this time more than one thousand Peruvians of the party had perished, and as by the native accounts they were not more than eighty leagues from the junction between the stream and a great river, Orellana was ordered to proceed in the vessel to the point of meeting, taking with him fifty men. In the course of three days Orellana reached the point where the _Coca_ joins the _Napo_, where, finding no provisions, he urged upon his men the necessity of proceeding down the river, leaving Pizarro to his fate. A youthful knight of Badajoz, whose chivalrous ideas revolted against this act of treachery, was left alone by the water’s side, to subsist as best he might until the arrival of Pizarro. [Sidenote: 1541.]