The great central plateau of North America is a Mer de Glace in stone.  It is a continent of rock, gullied by furious rivers; plateau on plateau of sandstone, with sluiceways through which lakes have escaped; the whole surface gigantically grotesque with the carvings of innumerable waters.  What is remarkable in the scenery is, that its sublimity is an inversion of the sublimity of almost all other grand scenery.  It is not so much the heights that are prodigious as the abysses.  At certain points in the course of the Colorado of the West you can drop a plumb line six thousand feet before it will reach the bosom of the current; and you can only gain the water level by turning backward for scores of miles and winding laboriously down some subsidiary canon, itself a chasm of awful grandeur.

Our travellers were now amid wild labyrinths of ranges, and buttes, and canons, which were not so much a portion of the great plateau as they were the debris that constituted its flanks.  Although thousands of feet above the level of the sea, they still had thousands of feet to ascend before they could dominate the desert.  Wild as the land was, it was thus far passable, while toward the north lay the untraversable.  What course should be taken?  Coronado, who had crimes to commit and to conceal, did not yet feel that he was far enough from the haunts of man.  As soon as possible he must again venture a push northward.

But not immediately.  The mules were fagged with hard work, weak with want of sufficient pasture, and had suffered much from thirst.  He resolved to continue westward to the pueblas of the Moquis, that interesting race of agricultural and partially civilized Indians, perhaps the representatives of the architects of the Casas Grandes if not also descended from the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley.  Having rested and refitted there, he might start anew for the San Juan.

Thus far they had seen no Indians except the vagrants who had robbed Phineas Glover.  But they might now expect to meet them; they were in a region which was the raiding ground of four great tribes:  the Utes on the north, the Navajos on the west, the Apaches on the south, and the Comanches on the east.  The peaceful and industrious Moquis, with their gay and warm blankets, their fields of corn and beans, and their flocks of sheep, are the quarry which attracts this ferocious cavalry of the desert, these Tartars and Bedouin of America.

Thurstane took more pains than ever with the guard duty.  Coronado, unmilitary though he was, and heartily as he abominated the Lieutenant, saw the wisdom of submitting to the latter’s discipline, and made all his people submit.  A practical-minded man, he preferred to owe the safety of his carcass to his rival rather than have it impaled on Apache lances.  Occasionally, however, he made a suggestion.

“It is very well, this night-watching,” he once observed, “but what we have most to fear is the open daylight.  These mounted Indians seldom attack in the darkness.”