As it was noon, and high time to eat something, we lit a fire a little higher up the hills under a leafy plane, and prepared our meal, while I reclined on my buffalo robe and gazed in delight at the wildly romantic scene that was expanded before me. The very deep river bed, cut in limestone strata, is very wide higher up, so that the river, when swollen in spring by the mountain torrents, quite fills it up, and attains a width of half a mile. On both sides of the bed rise grey masses of rock in the wildest shapes, leaving yawning ravines between them, through which the torrents flow to the river. The mountains on the eastern side are generally bare, and bushes only grow in these narrow valleys, out of which a solitary cypress here and there raises its crown to heaven: the western heights, on the contrary, are covered with dense cedar woods, whose dark lustreless foliage, added to the grey steep precipices, imparts a saddening and gloomy aspect to the scenery. In face of us, however, opened between a lofty rock gate the pleasant valley of Turkey Creek, through which we had come. Foaming and roaring, it leaps over gigantic strata of stone into the deep bed of the Rio Grande; while on its south side, far up the valley, the prairie glistens with its fresh verdure, and on the north the dark shadows of a colossal virgin forest run along the mountain range. We took leave of these banks for a short period, and marched up a steep ravine to the dark shade of the cedar woods, which soon offered us their agreeable coolness. The mountains here were of a conical shape, and so closely overgrown with not very tall cedars, that we were compelled to dismount on our buffalo path--although it had been used by the Indians on their expeditions for centuries--in order to get along at all. Never in my life did I grow so tired of a road; it seemed as if we rode round every hill, and after we had ridden for an hour and had a prospect eastward for a second, the wild rocky valley of the Rio Grande lay at our feet just as if we had but just left it. But a perfectly new and beautiful flora rewarded me for the monotonous, slow ride; in these shadows grew a number of exquisite plants, whose seeds I collected to transfer them to my home.