"So I must go back again... southwest from here..." I muttered, regretting all the dreary months and tedious one-long-runs and dirt and misery I had needlessly endured.

Old Juice shrugged. "I do not say you must. But if you will go on, I advise against your going farther north. Aztlan is not there. Northward is only more desert, more terrible desert, merciless desert in which even we hardy Mapimi cannot live. Only the Yaki can make even brief forays into that desert, and they only because they are more cruel than the desert itself."

I said, with sadness at the recollection, "I know what the Yaki are like. I will turn back, Chief Juice, as you advise."

"Go yonder." He gestured to the southward of where Tonatíu was dropping unowned into an unquilted bed behind the indistinct gray-white mountains which had kept pace with me—but kept their distance—all the way I had come through the desert. "If you would find Aztlan, you must go to those mountains, over those mountains, through those mountains. Beyond those mountains you must go."

* * *

And that is what I did: I went southwest, to and over and through and beyond the mountains. I had been seeing that remote, pale range for more than a year, and I fully expected to have to scale walls of sheer granite. But as I neared them, I saw that it had been only their distance that had made them appear so. The foothills rising from the desert were sparsely covered with typical dusty desert scrub, but the growth got denser and greener as I progressed. The genuine high mountains, when I reached them, I found to be as verdantly forested and hospitable as those of the Rarámuri country. Indeed, as I made my way through those mountains, I found cave villages where the inhabitants resembled the Rarámuri—even in the matter of bodily hair—and spoke very similar languages, and told me that they were in fact relatives of the Rarámuri, whose country, they said, was considerably farther north in that same mountain range.

So, when I came down from those heights at last, on the other side of the ranges, I came down to a beach somewhere south of the beach where I had landed after my involuntary sea voyage, more than ten years before. That coast is called the Sinalobola, I learned from the fisher tribes whose villages I found dotted along it. Those people, the Kaita, were not hostile to my traveling along their beaches, but neither were they inviting, they were simply indifferent; and their women smelled of fish. So I did not linger long in any of their villages as I went south along the Sinalobola, trusting in old Chief Juice's assertion that Aztlan was somewhere on that "coast of the great sea."

For most of my way, I kept to the level sands of the shore, with the ocean on my right hand. Sometimes I had to turn far inland to skirt a sizable lagoon or a coastal swamp or an impenetrable tangle of the stringy mangrove trees, and sometimes I had to wait on the bank of a river full of alligators until a Kaita boatman came by who would grudgingly ferry me to the other side. But my progress was more often rapid, unhindered, and uneventful. A cool breeze from off the ocean tempered the heat of the daytime sun, and after sundown the beach sands retained that same heat, so they were most comfortable to sleep on.

Long after I had left the Kaita lands and found no more villages where I could buy a meal of fish, I was able to dine well on those same odd drumming crabs that had frightened me when I first encountered them, years before. Also, the ocean's tidal movement led me to discover another seafood which I commend as a superbly tasty dish. I noticed that, whenever the waters receded, the flats of mud or sand were not entirely quiescent. Here and there, little spouts and plumes of water squirted upward from the exposed sea bed. Impelled by curiosity, I sloshed out across the flats, waited for one of the little wisps to squirt nearby, and dug down with my hands to find what had caused it. I came up with an ovoid, smooth blue shell, a clam as big as my palm. I suppose the spurt of water was its way of coughing sand out of its throat, or whatever a clam uses for a throat. Anyway, I splashed about the flats and collected an armload of the shellfish and took them ashore, intending to eat them raw.

But then I had a notion. I dug a shallow pit in the dry beach sand and laid the clams in it, first wrapping each shell in damp seaweed to prevent any grit from getting inside, then I piled a layer of sand over them. On top of that I laid a fire of hot-burning dead palm fronds, and let it blaze for a time, then scraped its ashes aside and disinterred my clams. Their shells had acted as miniature steam-bath houses, cooking them in their own salty juices. I pried off their upper shells and ate them—hot, tender, delicious—and I slurped the liquid from their nether shells, and I tell you: I have seldom enjoyed a better meal served up by even a palace kitchen.

As I continued on down the interminable coast, however, the tides no longer uncovered smooth and accessible flats onto which I could stroll to gather clams. The tides simply raised or lowered the level of the water standing in the boundless marshes which I found in my path. Those were thickets of almost junglelike undergrowth tangled among moss-hung mangroves which stood fastidiously high upon their multiple roots. At low tide, the swamp ground was a morass of slimy mud and stagnant puddles. At high tide, it was covered by great sheets of sullen salt water. At all times, the marshes were hot, damp, sticky, stinking, and infested with voracious mosquitoes. I tried to go eastward and find a way around them, but the swamps appeared to extend inland as far as the mountain ranges. So I made my way through them as best I could, wherever possible leaping from one to the next of the drier hummocks of land, the rest of the time wading in wretched discomfort through the fetid water and mud.

I do not remember how many days I struggled slowly through that ugliest, nastiest, and most disagreeable piece of country I had ever encountered. I lived mainly on palm sprouts and mexixin cress and other such greens that I recognized as edible. I slept each night by choosing a tree with a crotch high out of the reach of any passing alligator and the crawling night mists. I would pad that with as much gray paxtli moss as I could gather, and then wedge myself in it, I was not much surprised that I met no other human being, for none but the most torpid and spiritless of humans would have lived in that noxious wilderness. I had no idea what nation it belonged to, or if any had ever bothered to lay claim to it. I knew I was by then far south of the Sinalobola of the Kaita, and I guessed that I must be nearing the land of Nauyar Ixu, but I could not be sure until I heard somebody speak some word of some language.

And then, one afternoon, in the depths of that miserable swamp, I did come upon another human being. A loinclothed young man stood beside a scummy pool of water, peering down into it, holding poised over it a crude spear of three bone points. I was so surprised to see anybody, and so glad, that I did an inexcusable thing. I hailed him in a loud voice—at the very moment he struck his spear down into the water. He snapped his head up, glared at me, and replied in a snarl:

"You made me miss!"

I stood amazed—not by his rude words, for he had reason to resent my having spoiled his aim—but by his not having spoken, as I would have expected, in some dialect of Poré.

"I am sorry," I called, less loudly. He merely dropped his gaze to the water again, wrenching his spear loose from the muck at the bottom, while I approached him quietly and unobtrusively. As I reached his side, he jabbed down with the spear once more, and that time brought it up with a frog wriggling impaled on one of its tines.