suspicion that the
Cura had changed his tactics, and resolved to play a practical joke
upon our credulity--to send us on a fool's errand and laugh at us
for our pains. That he had been tampering with the two guides for
this purpose, struck us forcibly; for while he professed never to
have known any man who had seen the distant city, he recommended
these Meztitzos, as brothers, whom he had known from their boyhood,
they declared they had beheld it from the sierra on various
occasions. Nevertheless, Senor Huertis believed that the young men
spoke the truth, while the Cura, probably, did not; and hoping to
catch him in his own snare, if such had been laid, asked the guides
their terms, which, though high, he agreed to at once, without
cavil. They said it would take us eight days to reach the part of
the sierra described in the letter, and that we might have to wait
on the summit several days more, before the weather would afford a
clear view. They would be ready in two days; they had just returned
across the mountains from San Antonia de Guista, and needed rest
and repairs. There was a frankness and simplicity about these fine
fellows which would bear the severest scrutiny, and we could only
admit the bare possibility of our being mistaken.

"It took us three days, however, to procure a full supply of the
proper kind of provisions for a fortnight's abode in the sky, and
on the fourth, (May 5th,) we paid our formal respects to the Cura,
and started for the ascent--he not forgetting to remind us of the
promise to report to him the precise geographical locality of our
discovery."

The journal is again blank until May 9th, when the writer says, "Our
altitude, by barometer, this morning, is over 6000 feet above the valley
which we crossed three days ago; the view of it and its surrounding
mountains, sublime with chasms, yet grotesque in outline, and all
heavily gilded with the setting sun, is one of the most oppressively
gorgeous I ever beheld. The guides inform us that we have but 3000 feet
more to ascend, and point to the gigantic pinnacle before us, at the
apparent distance of seven or eight leagues; but that, before we can
reach it, we have to descend and ascend an immense barranca, (ravine,)
nearly a thousand feet deep from our present level, and of so difficult
a passage that it will cost us sever