Their perseverance is at length rewarded. Before their eyes looms up a line of elevated land, apparently the profile of a mountain.
But no; it cannot be that.
Trending horizontally, without curvature, against the sky, they know it is not a mountain, but a mesa—a table-land.
It is the Llano Estacado.
Drawing nearer, they get under the shadow of its beetling bluffs.
They see that these are rugged, with promontories projecting far out over the plain, forming what Spanish Americans, in their expressive phraseology, call ceja.
Into an embayment between two of the out-stretching spurs Barbato conducts them.
Joyously they ride into it, like ships long storm-tossed entering a haven of safety; for at the inner end of the concavity there is a cleft in the precipitous wall, reaching from base to summit, out of which issues a stream whose waters are sweet!
It is a branch of the Brazos River, along whose banks they have been some time travelling, lower down finding its waters bitter as gall. That was in its course through the selenite. Now they have reached the sandstone it is clear as crystal, and to them sweeter than champagne.
“Up it lies our way,” says the renegade guide, pointing to the portals of the canon through which the stream debouched from the table to the lower plain.