About midday we reached the mountain range which divides Pachatupec from the desert.  Anything more lonesome and depressing it were impossible to conceive.  Not a tree, not a shrub, not a blade of grass nor any green thing; neither running stream nor gleam of water could be seen.  It was a region in which the blessed rain of heaven had not fallen for untold ages, a region of desolation and death, of naked peaks, rugged precipices, and rocky ravines.  The heat from the overhead sun, intensified by the reverberations from the great masses of rock around us, and unrelieved by the slightest breath of air, was well-nigh suffocating.

Into this plutonic realm we plunged, and, after a scorching ride, reached the head of a pass which led straight down to the desert.  Here the cacique in command of the detachment told me, rather to my surprise, that we were to part company.  They were already a long way from home and saw no reason why they should go farther.  The desert, albeit four or five leagues distant, was quite visible, and, once started down the pass, the nandu would be bound to go thither.  He could not climb the rocks to the right or the left, and the braves would take care that he did not return.

As objection, even though I had felt disposed to make it, would have been useless, I bowed acquiescence.  The thought of resisting had more than once crossed my mind, and, by dint of struggling and fighting, I might have made the nandu so restive that I could not have been fastened on his back.  But in that case my second condition would have been worse than my first; I should have been taken back to Pachatupec and either burned alive or hacked to pieces, and, black as seemed the outlook, I clung to the hope that the man-killer would somehow be the means of saving my life.

The binding was effected with considerable difficulty.  It required the united strength of nearly all the braves to hold the nandu while the cacique and the keepers secured me on his back.  As he was let go he kicked out savagely, ripping open with his terrible claws one of the men who had been holding him.  The next moment he was striding down the steep and stony pass at a speed which, in a few minutes, left the pursuing and shouting Pachatupecs far behind.  The ground was so rough and the descent so rapid that I expected every moment we should come to grief.  But on we went like the wind.  Never in my life, except in an express train, was I carried so fast.  The great bird was either wild with rage or under the impression that he was being hunted.  The speed took my breath away; the motion make me sick.  He must have done the fifteen miles between the head of the pass and the beginning of the desert in little more than as many minutes.  Then, the ground being covered with sand and comparatively level, the nandu slacked his speed somewhat, though he still went at a great pace.

The desert was a vast expanse of white sand, the glare of which, in the bright sunshine, almost blinded me, interspersed with stretches of rock, swept bare by the wind, and loose stones.