We threw ourselves down and slept.

At sunrise we pushed on, and presently saw what Juan Lepe once before had seen, the vast southward-lying plain and the golden mountains of Cibao.
There rose a cry, it was so beautiful! The Admiral named it Vega Real, the Royal Plain.
Sweating, panting, we came at last down that most difficult descent into rolling forest and then to a small bright stream, beside it garden patches and fifty huts.

The inhabitants fled madly, we heard their frightened shouts and the screaming of children.

Thereafter we tried to keep in advance a small body of Indians, so that they might tell that the gods were coming, but that they would not injure.
Acclivity and declivity fell away.

We were fully in an enormous, fertile and populous plain.
The horses and the horsemen! At first they thought that these were one.
When some cowering group was surrounded and kept from breaking away, when Alonso de Ojeda or another leaped from steed to earth, from earth again to steed, they moaned with astonishment and some relief.