traveling through the cool forests once more; we felt the worst was over, and we pushed our way through the dusty thorn-covered vegetation, but we had not gone one hundred yards when the brush thinned and before us stretched a second ash-covered plain. The vegetation that I had thought was the limit of the desert was merely a narrow strip, a hedge between the desert we had crossed and the one before us. * * * * * WEARY, hungry, blistered as we were, there was no choice but to continue. The plain before us was smaller than the first, and having filled our gourds with the cactus juice, we grimly faced the burned-out world and the sufferings we knew were ahead of us. By noonday we had crossed it, had reached the luring vegetation on the farther side, only to find that beyond that was still another desert. But we were slightly better off now. Maliche stalked and killed a gopher-like animal that resembled a giant prairie-dog; we tasted the pulpy fruits of a cactus and found them edible, and I discovered a hollow in the sand filled with the eggs of some large lizard. With our stomachs filled, we felt far better, and the barren waste ahead appearing small, we decided to attempt the crossing before dark. The next few days--I lost all track of time--were a nightmare. Whether there were eight or eighty deserts I shall never know. They seemed interminable, endless, each promising to be the last, only to deceive us as another appeared beyond. And still those silent smoking peaks with their baleful glare at night seemed as distant as ever. My brain reeled, visions hovered before my bloodshot, smarting eyes; my entire body seemed shrivelled, dried, desiccated. We ate whatever came our way--lizards, snakes, horned-toads, even insects. Maliche’s ribs and joints seemed on the point of breaking through his skin; my face and hands were raw; streamers of skin hung in shreds from my neck and wrists, but still we kept on, and at last, more dead than alive, came to the end of the hellish wastes of lava and ash and reached the black basaltic ridges that led up to the flanks of the mighty volcanoes now close at hand. Between the frowning cliffs a stream flowed through a green swale, and with our last remaining strength, we reached the bank and plunged into the water. For hours we lay there, our burned, tortured bodies laved by the cool water, absorbing it, reveling in it, until at last, refreshed, our smarting raw flesh comforted and eased, hunger forced us to emerge and search for food. Alone I might have starved after all, but Maliche was a child of the wilderness; he seemed able literally to smell game if it were near, and he soon secured two pheasant-like birds, while I felt quite proud of myself for having captured a dozen or more big crayfish from beneath the stones in the river’s bed.