gotten them. They told me that they brought them from some very high mountains to the North, where they traded them for plumes and parrot feathers. They said that there were large towns and very large dwellings there.

Among these people we saw women treated more decently than in any other place we had seen in the Indies. They wear knee-length cotton shirts with short sleeves and over this, floor-length skirts of scraped deerskin. They keep them looking very nice by washing them with soap made from certain roots, which cleans them very well. They are open in the front and tied with straps. They also wear shoes.

All these people came to us to be touched and blessed. They were so insistent that it was very difficult for us to deal with this. Everyone, sick or healthy, wanted to be blessed. It often happened that women who were traveling with us gave birth along the way. Once the child was born they would bring it to us to be touched and blessed. They always accompanied us until they turned us over to other people. All these people were certain that we had come from heaven. While we were with these people, we would travel all day without eating until nighttime. They were astonished to see how little we ate. They never saw us get tired, and really we were so used to hardship that we did not feel tired. We enjoyed a great deal of authority and dignity among them, and to maintain this we spoke very little to them. The black man always spoke to them, ascertaining which way to go and what villages we would find and all the other things we wanted to know. We encountered a great number and variety of languages; God Our Lord favored us in all these cases, because we were able to communicate always. We would ask in sign language and be answered the same way, as if we spoke their language and they spoke ours. We knew six languages, but they were not useful everywhere, since we found more than a thousand differences.