He ate sparingly and reckoned that with self-denial he had food enough to last three days.  He might obtain more on the road by some happy chance or other.  Then becoming impatient he started again, keeping well among cypress and cactus, and laying his course toward the small mountain that he saw ahead.  He pressed forward the remainder of the afternoon, coming once or twice near to the great road that led to Vera Cruz.  On one occasion he saw a small body of soldiers, deep in dust, marching toward the port.  All except the officers were peons and they did not seem to Ned to show much martial ardor.  But the officers on horseback sternly bade them hasten.  Ned, as usual, had much sympathy for the poor peasants, but none for the officers who drove them on.

About sunset he came to a little river, the Teotihuacan he learned afterward, and he still saw before him the low mountain, the name of which was Cerro Gordo.  But his attention was drawn from the mountain by two elevations rising almost at the bank of the river.  They were pyramidal in shape and truncated, and the larger, which Ned surmised to be anywhere from 500 to 1000 feet square, seemed to rise to a height of two or three hundred feet.  The other was about two-thirds the size of the larger, both in area and height.

Although there was much vegetation clinging about them Ned knew that these were pyramids erected by the hand of man.  The feeling that this was a land old like Egypt came back to him most powerfully in the presence of these ancient monuments, which were in fact the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon.  There they stood, desolate and of untold age.  The setting sun poured an intense red light upon them, until they stood out vivid and enlarged.

So far as Ned knew, no other human being was anywhere near.  The loneliness in the presence of those tremendous ruins was overpowering.  He longed for human companionship.  A peon, despite the danger otherwise, would have been welcome.  The whole land took on fantastic aspects.  It was not normal and healthy like the regions from which he came north of the Rio Grande.  Every nerve quivered.

Then he did the bravest thing that one could do in such a position, forcing his will to win a victory over weirdness and superstition.  He crossed the shallow river and advanced boldly toward the Pyramid of the Sun.  His reason told him that there were no such things as ghosts, but it told him also that Mexican peons were likely to believe in them.  Hence it was probable that he would be safer about the Pyramid than far from it.  The country bade fair to become too rough for night traveling and he would stop there a while, refreshing his strength.