Kiana. James Jackson Jarves

      The women in general were a laughing, merry set, prone to affection, finery, and sensuous enjoyment. But the lower orders were workers in the fullest sense, the men being their task-masters, treating them as an inferior caste by imposing upon their sex arbitrary distinctions in their food, domestic privileges, duties, and even religious rites, so that their social condition was wantonly degraded. Yet females were admitted to power and often held the highest rank.

      Besides this state there was a vast throng of attendants carrying burdens, or driving before them their domestic animals. The families of the soldiery followed the procession, in irregular masses, as it defiled from the plain into the valleys that led towards the coast. In advancing, its numbers gradually lessened by the departure of warriors, and minor chiefs with their retainers, for their respective destinations. With the exception of those immediately about Kiana, all order of march soon ceased, and the crowd spread themselves over hill and valley shouting and jeering, in their good-natured hurry to reach their homes. The fowls cackled, the dogs barked. The swine with ominous grunts charged in all directions, upsetting impartially owners and neighbors, amid the laughter and cheers of the lookers on. Children grew doubly mischievous in the turmoil, running hither and thither, with frantic cries, pushing and crowding each other over rocks into the rapid streams, in which they were as much at home as the fishes. They tripped up their heavily laden parents in their gambols about their footsteps, dodging the quick blow in return with the slipperiness of eels, or repaying with equally noisy coin the threats of future floggings, which they well knew would be forgotten over the first meal. The more sedate vented their enthusiasm in deep toned songs, which, as they swelled into full chorus, filled the air with a wild music, in keeping with the scene. In forest and grove the birds listened and replied in musical notes that thrilled sweetly on the ear amid the medley of sounds. Nature was awake to the scene. From every tree and rock, out of each dell and off each hill-top, there came voices to mingle in the general jubilee. The mountain breezes poured their anthems in joyous harmony through branch and leaf. Buds and blossoms bowing before balmy airs, shook out their fragrance. Cascades sparkled and leaped, foamed and roared in the bright sun. Rivulets, looking in the distance like silver threads, stole with soothing murmurs along the plains, while the startled wild fowl with defiant note fled deeper into the forest or skulked closer in the thicket as the living current swept by.

      While all was thus life and motion in the uplands, the solitude of the sea coast remained as described in the last chapter. Alvirez and his party had disposed themselves for the night as best suited their individual convenience. There was no lack of accommodation or retirement. Each might have selected a village to himself, but they all remained within the enclosure where we left them. Juan and Beatriz occupied the principal house. Olmedo chose one near, and the good man was soon dreaming of his early Castilian cell. Tolta watched long and late, and then stretched himself, mastiff-like, upon a mat at the threshold of the house in which Beatriz slept. The three seamen, after sundry explorations, which seemed to give them small satisfaction, cursed their luck in being wrecked on a land which had not even copper, much less gold or silver, in short, anything whatever which came up to their ideas of spoil, and closing their eyes, muttered their discontent even in their sleep.