They came upon clustered pueblos set against a horizon of mesa and sky. The first sighting of stone houses and clustered plazas answered the friar's rumor and reframed it: these were not palaces of gold but constructed communities with rooms, storage pits, and pottery that spoke of generations. The smell of wood smoke and roasting maize rose to meet the expedition as it approached, and the sound of children at play — high, delicate — threaded into the adults’ guarded silence. The sight of masonry surprised the newcomers; what it did not reveal was the complex social world within those walls.
The initial entry became a tension of posture and posture's failure. Gifts were offered by emissaries under careful watch; the friar attempted rites of blessing and record-taking, his habit dusty at the hem. For some in the villages, the friar's presence was a curiosity; for others it was a threat. Misperception and fear, as often happens, swelled into conflict. Stores of food were interpreted by the soldiers as signs that plunder might be had; the indigenous inhabitants read the soldiers' weapons and mounted horses as signs of threat. Where there had been cautious exchange, there quickly emerged a pattern that would scorch memories for years: coercion, sieges, and rationed survival.
Winter pressed upon the camp. Temperatures fell at night; breaths came out as steam. The column established a winter encampment within striking distance of the pueblos. Under the weight of cold, supply lines thinned; men adapted by drawing closer to stores of grain and to the warmth of adobe during the day. When the river ice slickened in the mornings, men slipped and cursed without words. Scurvy and other illnesses found traction where vitamin-rich food lacked. The sick lay in tents that smelled faintly of boiled herbs, and a pall of silence rose over the camp when a man perished. Burial became a ritual practiced by a few, performed in haste beneath furrows of frost.
The tensions that had begun with misreading hardened into violence. A winter campaign against a cluster of communities led to the burning of houses and the taking of prisoners. Those losses changed local alliances, and the expedition, already stretched thin, had to garrison positions and manage a small holding that was not their home. The cost was human: men on both sides were killed; the horned sound of battle briefed the cold air. For some indigenous groups, violence was defense and reprisal; for many Spaniards it was a grim arithmetic of conquest and supply. The moral terrain became as complex as the physical one.
During this phase, scouts pushed beyond the mesas. One party, moving along the lip of a deep chasm and guided by native tracks, came to a vertiginous edge and looked down into a gulf carved by a river — a sheer wall of stone dropping hundreds of feet to a river that moved like a vein of chrome. That sight produced an unscripted awe. The rawness of the geography — a gorge that seemed to cleave the continent — produced a sense of scale that maps could not convey. Men stood in silence at the rim and felt the smallness of imperial designs against geological time. That discovery would be recorded and would later be cited in European letters as a new wonder of the world.
But wonder did not remove the immediate scarcity. Horses that had been bred for shorter transit began to fail at the extremes; hooves blistered on sharp limestone. Food stocks diminished despite rationing; a ration meant a smaller loaf, a thinner broth. There were nights when the cold and hunger conspired in such a way that men who had been aggressive in the capital grew docile and withdrawn, sitting on their heels and staring at the fire as though it were a window to a world that had not yet been reached. Those psychological shifts revealed the expedition's fragility — the narrow margin between endurance and collapse.
Disease continued to take its toll. Smallpox and other contagions, perhaps present in the traveling population or introduced by contact, spread among indigenous settlements as well as within the ranks. The movement of people along the routes became a vector for calamity in both directions; the visible ravages of fever and pustule invited fear and closure. Some native communities closed doors and retreating pathways; others negotiated with grim calculation. The social fabric of that winter was marked by loss, by mutual suspicion, and by moments of pragmatic trade — seeds for the spring, pottery for salted meat.
At the edge of that season the expedition reached a juncture. They had crossed the first great threshold: rumor met inhabitance, and the settlements they had sought were both more and less than expected. The column had endured cold, the loss of men, the psychological shrinkage of hopes, and the vision of landscapes that produced both awe and despair. They had seen a canyon that reconfigured their maps and had burned houses that would register as injury in local memory. Ahead there were promises of more land, of plains and perhaps, the friar's rumor persisting, distant cities of wealth. But before they could push further, they would have to resolve how many could be fed, who would command the detachments, and what liberty they had to press east into a region whose tracks led into the yellow grasses of a continent's interior. The decisions at that crossroad would send them into the next phase of the march, where the pursuit of rumor would lead across plains and into encounters that would test their endurance, their ethics, and their illusions of conquest.