fail in finding it. We went three days in this direction, and from thinking that, if we missed the convent of Chanchanha, in this direction, there was afterwards no place to have recourse to, on account of the great distance that we were from a town on all sides, a great sadness came over my companion Padres, so that they told me that we should change our direction, since, if we did not, it was certain that we should perish in these forests, and that the best thing was to try to strike the road which was being opened from this Province to that of Guatemala, which runs from North to South. To please them I yielded the opinion which I had determined on. From there we took the direction to the West, although the distance in leagues and forests which we intended to traverse was more than sixty or seventy. This distance was a great one, for us to be able, breaking through such bad thickets and suffering from hunger for thirteen days, to come through alive, without exaggeration.
Hard Travel in the Wilderness for Fifteen Days. "In those fifteen days that we traveled in a northwesterly direction, we met with many akalchees, or swamps, which consist of very bad passages through water and low and thorny shrubs with a kind of square grass, which, if it caught our clothes, held us by the multitude of thorns, which grow on the four corners from top to bottom; and if it caught our face, hands or legs, it cut them like a small saw; so that as most of the woods are akalchees, which consist of this grass, except on the high places, we were always walking with our feet, hands or faces wounded, so that we did not know what to do. Thus wounded, we went through some very long akalchees, when we directed one of the Indians whom we brought, to climb a tree so as to look out and see where we could make a short cut through the said akalche, for we were not able to suffer any longer on account of the many sores which the said grass caused us. This said Indian climbed the tree, and gave us the news that he had discovered a great meadow or plain towards the northwest. Some instinct made me believe it, but to see whether imagination and the wish we had to find it, had this effect, we took that direction, so that in a little while we came upon the said meadow; but as we entered it, at the beginning it had half a
