With four hundred Spaniards and twenty thousand Indians, De Guzmán marched from Mexico, and the people waited each day to hear that he had conquered a great empire in the north.
As he went, rumors of the Seven Cities kept coming to him, and his men were often so excited he could hardly get them to sleep enough. For days they pressed eagerly forward, hoping each day to find the Seven Cities at hand; but instead of this, the country each day grew more desolate, the mountains grew steeper and the roads harder to find, while the Seven Cities, instead of coming nearer, were always farther and farther to the north.
Then the Indians began to desert and the Spaniards to complain. “We have been deceived,” they said, “and we shall all die in this bleak land. Let us return to Mexico.”
For a while Nuño de Guzmán cheered them by holding ever before them the reward that awaited them, but at last he too grew discouraged and afraid; they all turned about and marched sadly back to Mexico.
“We will go back now,” said Nuño de Guzmán, “but some day I will have the right sort of an army and I will come again. Tejos himself shall lead me, and I will yet find and conquer those Seven Cities.”
But when he returned to Mexico, Tejos was dead, and the story of Nuño de Guzmán’s misfortunes discouraged others; so for six years no one went to seek the Seven Cities. Then a strange thing happened.
The Wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca
Into the town of Culiacan there one day came wandering four strange men. They were barefooted and almost naked. The little clothing they wore was made of skins and hung in rags about them. Their hair lay in a tangled mass upon their shoulders, and their beards reached almost to their knees.
They fell at the feet of the first Spaniard they met, crying, “Thank God! Thank God! At last! At last!” Then they seized his hands and kissed them, kissed each other, and danced about, clapping their hands and shouting for joy.
“They are madmen,” said the people who gathered around to look at them. “What shall we do with them?”