Sweating, panting, we came at last down that most difficult
descent into rolling forest and then to a small bright stream,
beside it garden patches and fifty huts. The inhabitants
fled madly, we heard their frightened shouts and the screaming
of children. Thereafter we tried to keep in advance a
small body of Indians, so that they might tell that the gods
were coming, but that they would not injure.
Acclivity and declivity fell away. We were fully in an
enormous, fertile and populous plain.
The horses and the horsemen! At first they thought that
these were one. When some cowering group was surrounded
and kept from breaking away, when Alonso de Ojeda or
another leaped from steed to earth, from earth again to
steed, they moaned with astonishment and some relief. But
the horses, the horses--never to have seen any great four-footed things, and now these that were proud and
pawed the
earth and neighed and--De Ojeda's black horse--reared,
curvetted, bounded, appeared to threaten! The eyes, the
mane, the great teeth!--There grew a legend that they
were fed upon men's flesh, red men's flesh!
How many red men were in Quisquaya I do not know. In
some regions they dwelled thickly, in others were few folk.
In this wide, long, laughing plain dwelled many, in clean
towns sunk among trees good to look at and dropping fruit;
by river or smaller stream, with plantings of maize, batata,
cassava, jucca, maguey, and I know not what beside.
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