As nothing could be attempted for the present, we submitted to our fate, and were conducted by a long and dreary journey to the eastern shores of the Rio Colorado of the West, until at last we arrived at one of the numerous and beautiful villages of the Arrapahoes.  There we passed the winter in a kind of honourable captivity.  An attempt to escape would have been the signal of our death, or, at least, of a harsh captivity.  We were surrounded by vast sandy deserts, inhabited, by the Clubs (Piuses), a cruel race of people, some of them cannibals.  Indeed, I may as well here observe that most of the tribes inhabiting the Colorado are men-eaters, even including the Arrapahoes, on certain occasions.  Once we fell in with a deserted camp of Clubmen, and there we found the remains of about twenty bodies, the bones of which had been picked with apparently as much relish as the wings of a pheasant would have been by a European epicure.  This winter passed gloomily enough, and no wonder.  Except a few beautiful groves, found here and there, like the oases in the sands of the Sahara, the whole country is horribly broken and barren.  Forty miles above the Gulf of California, the Colorado ceases to be navigable, and presents from its sources, for seven hundred miles, nothing but an uninterrupted series of noisy and tremendous cataracts, bordered on each side by a chain of perpendicular rocks, five or six hundred feet high, while the country all around seems to have been shaken to its very centre by violent volcanic eruptions.

Winter at length passed away, and with the first weeks of spring were renovated our hopes of escape.  The Arrapahoes, relenting in their vigilance, went so far as to offer us to accompany them in an expedition eastward.  To this, of course, we agreed, and entered very willingly upon the beautiful prairies of North Sonora.  Fortune favoured us; one day, the Arrapahoes, having followed a trail of Apaches and Mexicans, with an intent to surprise and destroy them, fell themselves into a snare, in which they were routed, and many perished.

We made no scruples of deserting our late masters, and, spurring our gallant steeds, we soon found that our unconscious liberators were a party of officers bound from Monterey to Santa Fe, escorted by two-and-twenty Apaches and some twelve or fifteen families of Ciboleros.  I knew the officers, and was very glad to have intelligence from California.  Isabella was as bright as ever, but not quite so light-hearted.  Padre Marini, the missionary, had embarked for Peru, and the whole city of Monterey was still laughing, dancing, singing, and love-making, just as I had left them.

The officers easily persuaded me to accompany them to Santa Fe, from whence I could readily return to Monterey with the next caravan.