Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/197

Rh becomes more level at "Chinapa" and a short distance farther along shapes itself into the sides of the wild Cajon, in the bottom of which one rides beside the foaming Sonora to near Bacuachi. Here the country becomes open, the depression of the chain of the "Manzanal" permits a glimpse in the west of the pillar-shaped Picacho; on the eastern side the dunes extend like a low table-land ten miles toward the east, where a majestic cordillera of picturesque shape and covered with fir-trees stretches from northwest to south. There are a succession of high chains—the Sierra de Bacuachi, the Sierra Purica, and, in the farthest southeast, the mountains of Oposura or the Sierra Grande.

If Coronado steadily followed the course of the Sonora, Suya should be looked for in the valley of Bacuachi. But if he followed the Bacuachi River, going therefore directly north, he would have approached the Canania, and consequently the sources of the Rio Santa Cruz. The accounts on these points are unusually indefinite, the same writer often contradicting himself several times. I am inclined to the opinion that he followed the Rio Sonora all the time, and that San Hierónymo should therefore be sought near the ruins of Mututicâchi. Juan Jaramillo says that the Spaniards marched from "Sonora" for four days through an uninhabited region, and then came to a brook which he calls "Nexpa"; followed down this brook for two days to a chain of mountains, along which they continued for two days. This chain of mountains was