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Having long struggled to overcome the desire we felt to descend the Guarapiche to the Golfo Triste, we took the direct road to the mountains. The valleys of Guanaguana and Caripe are separated by a kind of dyke, or calcareous ridge, well known by the name of the Cuchilla* de Guanaguana.
For myself, I did not care very much, but could not help thinking a great deal of Dolores, who would now have a fresh grief to increase her pain. For a distance of three or four miles we rode at a fast gallop, on the slopes of the Cuchilla paused to breathe our horses, and, dismounting, stood for some time gazing back over the wide landscape spread out before us.
"What's the other?" asks Cypriano, seeing that the gaucho hesitates to declare it. "Why, knock her on the head, or draw the blade of a cuchilla across her throat, and so stop her grunting at once and for ever. The old wretch deserves no better fate and hanging's too good for her.
And then above the rush of hurrying feet, above the cries of blasphemous wonder and alarm as the Palace vomited out its raucous filth, there arose a cackling horror that Douglass would never forget as long as he lived, the vacuous gibbering of Dolores Ysobel de Tejada, kissing her blood-stained cuchilla and screaming weird endearments to two dead men in Jalisco.
And now she was waiting, waiting with a fierce impatience that bruised the soft taper fingers gripping the jeweled hilt of a slender cuchilla hidden in her bosom, waiting for the vicious crackle that would mercifully appease the maddening insistence of those two dead men calling from their graves in far-off Ameca. For the greater part of an hour she shivered in an ecstasy of expectation and fear.
Still, his "shortest way" to Montevideo continued to puzzle me considerably. For two or three hours we had been riding nearly parallel to a range of hills, or cuchilla, extending away on our left hand towards the south-east. But we were gradually drawing nearer to it, and apparently going purposely out of our way only to traverse a most lonely and difficult country.
In the canada we stopped to water our horses, and there heard that the enemy were advancing along it at a rapid pace, evidently hoping to cut off our supposed retreat towards the Cuchilla.
So, in fact, when old Isaac of York came to negotiate with Don Beltran de Cuchilla for the ransom of the Alfaqui's daughter of Xixona, our dearest Rebecca was no more dead than you and I; and it was in his rage and fury against Ivanhoe that Isaac told that cavalier the falsehood which caused the knight so much pain and such a prodigious deal of bloodshed to the Moors: and who knows, trivial as it may seem, whether it was not that very circumstance which caused the destruction in Spain of the Moorish power?
On the north-east opens the valley in which is situated the convent of Caripe. The aspect of this valley is peculiarly attractive, for being shaded by forests, it forms a strong contrast with the nudity of the neighbouring mountains, which are bare of trees, and covered with gramineous plants. We found the absolute height of the Cuchilla to be 548 toises.
They were not clouds, however, but the sierras of the range weirdly named Cuchilla de las Animas Ghost-haunted Mountains. At length, like a person who puts his binocular into his pocket and begins to look about him, I recalled my vision from its wanderings over illimitable space to examine the objects close at hand.
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