eafened us, and a flood of yellowish water came rushing by; I saw one
of our coverings float off on its surface, and almost immediately, as if
impelled by some superhuman force, the rocks came rolling down, dashing
together under the force of the liquid avalanche.

One minute more and it would have been all over with us, or, at the very
least, we should have lost all our baggage and weapons, without which
our position must have been truly critical. As it was, our hats only had
sailed off in company with our covering; this loss much vexed us, for
none of us except l'Encuerado could walk with a bare head under the rays
of a tropical sun. We should have been somewhat consoled by meeting with
a palm-tree; but in the mean time, the Mistec, like all his countrymen,
knew well how to meet such an emergency. So we covered our heads with
the leaves of the water-lily, often used by the Indian women for a
parasol.

We knew by experience the rapidity with which these mountain torrents
will overflow. If it had been a month later during the rainy period, of
course we should not have exposed ourselves to the peril of camping in
the bed of a stream; for we had remarked the evening before that the sky
was obscured by gray clouds, and this ought to have put us on our guard.

The furious waves continued to bear down with them, without any effort,
immense masses of rock; but the body of the water, which did not
increase, showed us that it would ebb as rapidly as it had swollen.
L'Encuerado was obliged to content himself with some muddy water for
making our coffee; but if we had pretended to preserve all the
prejudices of civilized life, adieu to all our idea of traversing
Mexico. Besides this, we had a fresh disaster to grieve over; the
remainder of the raccoon, which we had kept for our breakfast, had been
lost in company with our bag of rice.

[Illustration: "The rocks came rolling down, dashing together under the
force of the liquid avalanche."]

We started again, not much enlivened by this series of misfortunes,
satisfied with nibbling for breakfast some morsels of _totopo_. All
our indisposition had now fortunately vanished, but we could not help
feeling some degree of ill-will against both the euphorbias and the
torrent. A long march, during which we several times left and rejoined
the course of the stream, brought us close to a hill at the foot of
which was a vast swamp. I gave the signal for halting. L'Encuerado in
our march ha