midnight
`` It shall then be his last treason , '' said Don Estevan ; and they now rode silently on with the certainty that Cuchillo was before them . Strange chain of coincidences ! When the sun appeared in the horizon , the different actors in this drama , apparently drawn together by accident , but in truth impelled onwards by the hand of God , had met in the most inaccessible part of the great American desert . The darkness was no longer that of midnight -- the outlines of the different objects began to be visible , and the peaks of the hills looked like domes or fantastic turrets in the half-light . Detached from the mass of the mountains , a rock in the form of a truncated cone towered up like an outwork . A cascade fell noisily from an adjacent hill into a deep gulf below , and in front of the rock a row of willows and cotton-trees indicated the neighbourhood of a stream . Then the immense plain of the delta formed by the two arms of the Rio Gila -LRB- which from east to west cuts for itself a double passage through the chain of the Misty Mountains -RRB- displayed itself in all its sombre majesty .