enter there, will be lost. On the coast is no maize: the inhabitants
eat the powder of rush and of straw, and fish that is caught in the
sea from rafts, not having canoes. With grass and straw the women
cover their nudity. They are a timid and dejected people.

We think that near the coast by way of those towns through which we
came are more than a thousand leagues of inhabited country, plentiful
of subsistence. Three times the year it is planted with maize and
beans. Deer are of three kinds; one the size of the young steer of
Spain. There are innumerable houses, such as are called bahios. They
have poison from a certain tree the size of the apple. For effect no
more is necessary than to pluck the fruit and moisten the arrow with
it, or, if there be no fruit, to break a twig and with the milk do the
like. The tree is abundant, and so deadly that, if the leaves be
bruised and steeped in some neighboring water, the deer and other
animals drinking it soon burst.

We were in this town three days. A day's journey farther was another
town, at which the rain fell heavily while we were there, and the
river became so swollen we could not cross it, which detained us
fifteen days. In this time Castillo saw the buckle of a sword-belt on
the neck of an Indian, and stitched to it the nail of a horseshoe. He
took them, and we asked the native what they were: he answered that
they came from heaven. We questioned him further, as to who had
brought them thence: they all responded that certain men who wore
beards like us had come from heaven and arrived at that river,
bringing horses, lances, and swords, and that they had lanced two
Indians. In a manner of the utmost indifference we could feign, we
asked them what had become of those men. They answered that they had
gone to sea, putting their lances beneath the water, and going