Immediately to the left there were five remarkable conical hills.

These we successively passed, and then entered a narrow, short valley, between the last of these cones and the hill we were about to ascend.

The ground was covered with fragments of indurated quartz (of which the whole group was composed), in parallelograms of different dimensions.

The scene was like that of a city whose structures had been shaken to pieces by an earthquake--one of ruin and desolation.

The faces of the hills, both here and in other parts of the group, were cracked by solar heat, and thus the rock was scaling off.