58 THE ANGOSTURA OR NARROWS. 
peculiar to themselves. Instead of pointing 
with their hands and fingers, they generally 
employ the mouth, which is done by thrust- 
ing out the lips in the direction of the spot, 
or object, which the inquirer wishes to find 
out—accompanied by agui or allt esté. This 
habit of substituting labial gestures for the 
usual mode of indicating, has grown from 
the use of the sarape, which keeps their hands 
and arms perpetually confined. 
From the place where we left the wagons, 
till we reached the Angostura, or narrows (a 
distance of 60 miles), we had followed a plain 
cart-road, which seemed everywhere passable 
for wagons. Here, however, we found the 
point of a table plain projecting abruptly 
against the river, so as to render it impossible 
for wagons to pass without great risk. The 
huge masses of solid rock, which occur in this 
place, and the rugged cliffs or brows of the 
table lands which rise above them, appear to 
have been mistaken by a detachment of the 
Texan Santa Fé expedition, for spurs of the 
Rocky Mountains; an error which was ra- 
tional enough, as they not unfrequently tower 
to the height of two thousand feet above the 
valley, and are often as rocky and rough as 
the rudest heaps of trap-rock can make them. 
By ascending the main summit of these craggy 
promontories, however, the eastern ridge of the 
veritable Rocky Mountains may be seen, still 
very far off in the western horizon, with a 
wide-spread and apparently level table plain, 
intervening and extending in every direction 
