ays
darted down with greater force upon our heads. There had been a slight
breeze in the morning, blowing fresh from over the snowy summits of the
Cordilleras; but that had now died entirely away, and not a breath of
air stirred the stagnant atmosphere. The heat at length became almost
insupportable, while our eyes could scarcely bear the glare of the sun
on the white glittering sand.

To do the Spaniards credit, they bore up bravely for a long time against
the heat and thirst and fatigue which assailed them. The horses,
however, which had only been scantily supplied with water the night
before, began to knock up--their ears dropped, their heads hung down,
and their respiration became thick and fast. Ithulpo had supplied my
father and me with cacao, by chewing a piece of which occasionally, we
avoided any feeling of hunger; and as we also wetted our lips, when they
became parched, with the water from our flasks, we did not suffer much
from thirst. Still the sensation of oppression and fatigue was very
painful. We received too, ere long, a warning of what might be our
fate, in the spectacle which met our sight. The sun had reached his
meridian height, and was descending towards the waters of the Pacific,
and still it appeared that we had made no more progress than in the
morning, when we came upon the bleached bones of several mules and
horses, and by their side appeared, just rising above the sand, the
skeletons of three human beings. It appeared as if they had all been
struck down together by the same fiery blast. The soldiers, as we
passed, turned their looks aside, without uttering a word, each one
feeling that he might shortly become like those ghastly remnants of
mortality. I observed that the heads of the animals were all turned
towards the south, by which I judged that thus they had probably
travelled over a greater distance of the burning desert than we had yet
passed, so that we were yet not half over our difficulties.

"Those skeletons show that we are on the high road across the desert," I
remarked to my father.

"I am afraid not, David," he answered. "They may have lost their way,
and we have stumbled on them by chance."

Such, I at once saw, was too likely to be the case.

The gauze-like mist of which I had before spoken, now appeared to grow
more dense, and to lose its transparent appearance; at the same time
that the rays of the sun struck down with fiercer heat, and the
atmosphere grew m