the Spaniards, therefore it was decided at a solemn council that Otomie
and I her husband should go on an embassy to the chief town of the
nation, that was known as the City of Pines, and strive to win it back
to the Aztec standard.

Accordingly, heralds having been sent before us, we started upon our
journey, not knowing how we should be received at the end of it. For
eight days we travelled in great pomp and with an ever-increasing
escort, for when the tribes of the Otomie learned that their princess
was come to visit them in person, bringing with her her husband, a man
of the Teules who had espoused the Aztec cause, they flocked in vast
numbers to swell her retinue, so that it came to pass that before we
reached the City of Pines we were accompanied by an army of at least ten
thousand mountaineers, great men and wild, who made a savage music as we
marched. But with them and with their chiefs as yet we held no converse
except by way of formal greeting, though every morning when we started
on our journey, Otomie in a litter and I on a horse that had been
captured from the Spaniards, they set up shouts of salutation and made
the mountains ring. Ever as we went the land like its people grew wilder
and more beautiful, for now we were passing through forests clad with
oak and pine and with many a lovely plant and fern. Sometimes we crossed
great and sparkling rivers and sometimes we wended through gorges and
passes of the mountains, but every hour we mounted higher, till at
length the climate became like that of England, only far more bright. At
last on the eighth day we passed through a gorge riven in the red rock,
which was so narrow in places that three horsemen could scarcely have
ridden there abreast. This gorge, that is five miles long, is the high
road to the City of Pines, to which there was no other access except by
secret paths across the mountains, and on either side of it are sheer
and towering cliffs that rise to heights of between one and two thousand