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