The Indians here were defiant and disagreeable, and would not even give us any information about the track we were to follow.  They had the reputation of stealing mules and killing travellers for the sake of the corn the latter are likely to carry.  I therefore put two men on guard and allowed them to fire off a rifle shot as a warning, something they always like to do.  The sound reverberated through the still night with enough force to frighten a whole army of robbers.  The next morning I sent for the most important Tepehuane, told him the object of my visit, and asked him about the track.  He gave me what information he could, but he was unable to procure a guide for a longer time than that day.  We were then left to ourselves, with the odds against us.  Twice we lost our way, the first time passing a mitote dancing-place, and coming to a halt before a steep mountain wall, passable only for agile Indians.  The second time we landed at the edge of a deep barranca, and there was nothing to do but to turn back to a ranch we had passed some time before.  Luckily we met there a Tepehuane and his wife, who assured us that we were at last on the right track.  However, we did not advance farther than the confluence of two arroyos, which the man had pointed out to us deep down in the shrubbery.  Before leaving us he promised to be at our camp in the morning to show us the road to Las Botijas, a small aggregation of ranches at the summit.  In a straight line we had not gone that day more than three miles.

When passing one of our guide’s ranches—­and he had three within sight—­I noticed near the track a small jacal about 100 yards off.  The man told me that he was a shaman and that here he kept his musical outfit, ceremonial arrows, etc.; though he appeared to be an open-hearted young man, I could not induce him to show me this private chapel of his, and we had to go on.  He parted from us on the summit, but described the road so well that we encountered no difficulty during the remaining two days of our journey.

I was glad to be once more up on the highlands, the more so that we succeeded in finding there arroyos with water and grass.  On reaching the top of the cordon we had been following, we came upon a camino real running between the villages of San Francisco and Santa Teresa, and now we were in the Sierra del Nayarit.  I was rather surprised to find another barranca close by, parallel with the one we had just left.  As far as I could make out, this new gorge begins near the pueblo of Santa Maria Ocotan, high up in the Sierra; at least my old Mexican informed me that the river which waters it rises at that place and passes the Cora pueblos of Guasamota and Jesus Maria.  We travelled along the western edge of this barranca, within which there are some Aztec, but mainly Cora villages.  There is still another barranca to the east of and parallel to this, and in this the Huichols live.

What is called Sierra del Nayarit is in the beginning a rather level and often narrow cordon, and the track south leads near the edge of the Barranca de Jesus Maria for ten or twelve miles.  Along this ridge hardly any other kind of tree is to be seen than Pinus Lumholtzii.  A variety of pine which resembles this very much, but is much larger, and which I think may also be a new species, was observed after leaving Pueblo Nuevo.