For two days this continued. The land was almost park-like in its beauty, its open glades, its flashing streams, its giant trees. We fared well, the weather was perfect, and all our past sufferings and perils were forgotten. But on the third day the surroundings changed. The forest gave place to scrubby, brushy jungle; the soft earth was replaced by rough, rocky, sterile ground; great boulders were to be seen here and there, and in places we crossed bare areas of jagged broken rock. Rapidly the vegetation grew more and more sparse and the rock-strewn areas wider. Aloes, cacti and spiny bromeliads took the place of vines, shrubs and trees, and by mid-afternoon we came to the last of the vegetation and halted at the edge of a vast barren expanse of raw red rock, immense black boulders and dunes of glaring multicolored sand. I had thought a desert could not exist, but here before us was a veritable desert--the burnt-out, cinder-blasted, lava-covered plain, desolated by some past eruption of the volcanoes, that now towered to the zenith within a dozen miles of where we stood. And once more I felt that strange tingling of my scalp, that indescribable fear of the supernatural, as I remembered the prophecy--the words of Katchilcan, “and beyond the Pit of the great Zotional, even then one must cross the eight deserts.” * * * * * BUT once again I laughed my fears away. There was nothing strange, nothing supernatural about this lava flow. It was exactly the same formation as the “Bad Lands” of our own northwest. Provided with plenty of water and food anyone could cross it. It was barely a dozen miles in width--a few hours’ tramp to the farther side--and there was only one desert. But to cross so late in the day would be foolish. It was wiser to camp for the night, and start fresh at dawn before the cinder and lava scintillated with the heat of the tropical sun.