Don Zamorra was old, nearly as old as I am now; and as I speedily
discovered, he had passed the greater part of his life in Spanish America,
where he had held high office under the crown. He could hardly talk about
anything else, in fact, and once he began to discourse about his former
greatness and the marvels of the Indies (as South and Central America were
then sometimes called) he never knew when to stop. He had crossed the
Andes and seen the Amazon, sailed down the Orinoco and visited the mines
of Potosi and Guanajuata, beheld the fiery summit of Cotopaxi, and peeped
down the smoky crater of Acatenango. He told of fights with Indians and
wild animals, of being lost in the forest, and of perilous expeditions in
search of gold and precious stones. When Zamorra spoke of gold his whole
attitude changed, the fires of his youth blazed up afresh, his face glowed
with excitement, and his eyes sparkled with greed. At these times I saw in
him a true type of the old Spanish Conquestadores, who would baptize a
cacique to save him from hell one day, and kill him and loot his treasure
the next.

Don Alberto had, moreover, a firm belief in the existence of the fabled El
Dorado, and of the city of Manoa, with its resplendent house of the sun,
its hoards of silver and gold, and its gilded king. Thousands of
adventurers had gone forth in search of these wonders, and thousands had
perished in the attempt to find them. Señor Zamorra had sought El Dorado
on the banks of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro; others, near the source of
the Rio Grande and the Marañon; others, again, among the volcanoes of
Salvador and the canons of the Cordilleras. Zamorra believed that it lay
either in the wilds of Guiana, or the unexplored confines of Peru and the
Brazils.

He had heard of and believed even greater wonders--of a stream on the
Pacific coast of Mexico, whose pebbles were silver, and whose sand was