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Resting at this point, Bolivar sent back assistance to the stragglers who still lingered on the road, and despatched parties to collect horses and communicate with the few guerillas who roamed about that region. Barreiro, the Spanish commander, held the Tunja province with two thousand infantry and four hundred horse.

He descended by the river called Cassanar, which riseth in Nuevo Reyno out of the mountains by the city of Tunja, from which mountain also springeth Pato; both which fall into the great river of Meta, and Meta riseth from a mountain joining to Pamplona, in the same Nuevo Reyno de Granada.

These were the Chibchas, Muyscas, or Mozcas, divided into two kingdoms, with capitals at Bogota and Tunja, but united apparently in spiritual allegiance to the high pontiff of Sogamozo or Iraca. By a long and ascetic novitiate, this ghostly ruler was reputed to have acquired such sanctity that the waters and the rain obeyed him, and the weather depended on his will.

These Paramos indicate ten partial risings of the back of the Cordilleras. The declivity of the eastern chain is extremely rapid on the eastern side, where it bounds the basin of the Meta and the Orinoco; it is widened on the west by the spurs on which are situated the towns of Santa Fe de Bogota, Tunja, Sogamoso and Leiva.

Before the terrible passage was completed one hundred men had died of cold, fifty of them being Englishmen. Not a horse was left, and it was necessary to abandon the spare arms, and even some of those borne by the soldiers. It was little more than the skeleton of an army that at length reached the beautiful valley of Sagamoso, in the heart of the province of Tunja, on the 6th of July, 1819.

The former was on his way to Tunja to render an account of his Venezuelan campaign, when he learned that some Venezuelan troops commanded by General Urdaneta, who were in the territory of Nueva Granada, were quarreling with the native soldiers. He went directly to the army to try to prevent anarchy and dissensions between the Venezuelans and the natives of Nueva Granada.

We may venture to say that the tradition of a naked man covered with powdered gold must have belonged originally to a hot region, and not to the cold table-lands of Cundirumarca, where I often saw the thermometer sink below four or five degrees; however, on account of the extraordinary configuration of the country, the climate differs greatly at Guatavita, Tunja, Iraca, and on the banks of the Sogamozo.