the whole
of the twenty-four hours we had had but a pint of water apiece. Pablo, I
am sure, had given half of his own scant allowance to El Sabio. The
other animals--it was all that we could do for them--had only their
dusty mouths and nostrils wiped out with a wet sponge. They were
pitiable objects, with their bleeding legs, their haggard eyes, their
out-hanging tongues, and their quivering flanks. As Fray Antonio
unsaddled his horse I saw that there were tears in his eyes; but the
rest of us, I fear, were too thoughtful of our own misery to feel much
sorrow for the misery of our beasts.

I suppose that a man must suffer the lack of it, as we then did, in
order to know how precious a thing water is. And to give some notion of
its preciousness to those who not only are free at any time to drink
their fill of it, but even can fill bath-tubs with it, and feel the joy
of it on their bare bodies whenever they are so minded, I will say that
when a little digging gave us that night as much water as we wanted, our
joy was far greater than it would have been had we there found the
hidden city of which we were in search.

Our well was sunk in the broad sandy bottom of the _arroyo_, in the
midst of a narrow and delectably grassy valley between two foot-hills.
And the abundance and the sweetness of the water, as well as the
presence of grass, showed us that but a little way up this valley there
must be an open stream. We drank, and our beasts drank, until all of our
skins were nigh to bursting; and the abundance of water was so great
that we even could wash the dust at last from our parched faces and
necks and arms; and much like raw beef our skins looked when our washing
was ended, and the stinging of them was as though we had been whipped
with nettles. It was our intention now to leave the plains and to march
along the edge of the foot-hills parallel with the main range, otherwise
we should not have ventured thus to wash ourselves. In a region where
alkali dust is in the air, washing is to be shunned; for each time that
the skin is cleaned the new deposit of dust takes a deeper biting hold.

It was rather that we might escape the misery of further travel on the
arid plains than because we had any strong hopes of thus finding the way
of which we were in search that we had decided to change our line of
march. Young had begun openly to express his contempt for the Aztec map,
and in the hearts of all of us had sprung up some doubt