They knew the highway down the Gila to the Colorado, and they told Cardenas about the tall natives living in the lower part of it, the same whom Alarcon and Diaz had met.

In the direction in which Cardenas was to go they said it was twenty days' journey through an unpopulated country, when people would again be met with.

After the party had travelled for twenty days they arrived at a great canyon of the Colorado River, apparently not having met with the people mentioned.

If Cardenas started from the Moki towns, as has generally been believed, where would he have arrived by a journey of twenty days, when an able-bodied man can easily walk to the brink of Marble Canyon from there in three or four days?
Why did the guides, if they belonged in the Moki towns, conduct Cardenas so far to show him a river which was so near?
The solution seems to be that he started from some locality other than the present Moki towns.

That is to say, there has been an error, and these Moki towns are not Tusayan.
Where Cardenas reached the great canyon the river came from the NORTH-EAST and turned to the SOUTH-SOUTH-WEST.