CHAPTER IX.
EL DORADO.
Inveteracet hoc quoque ; et quod hodie exemplis tuemur, inter exempla erit.
— Tacitus.
So they called the country El Dorado, The Gilded; some of them so called it not knowing why ; the name even fastening itself upon a political division of the state.
Some of them knew that since the coming of the Spaniards, when Vasco Nunez hunted for the golden temple of Dabaiba, and Juan Ponce de Leon searched for a fountain of perpetual youth, and Cortes freighted treasure ships from Mexico, and Pizarro from Peru, down to the silvery daj^s of stock gambling, and the cold dull tyranny of railroad management, there has ever been in the minds of the greedy, somewhere a region ruled by El Dorado, or rather a place called El Dorado, or The Gilded. It was not necessary the gilt should be gold, or even that there should be gild- ing at all ; indeed, the thing was rather of the Jack-a lantern order, or like the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, when ready to put your hand upon it, it was not there.
The true, or original El Dorado — that is, true so far as any aborginal or other mythology can be woven into sober story — was in South America, where, as some say, the micaceous quartz in the Essequibo val- ley, in Guiana, gilded the land. Or it may have been because the high priest of Bogota spnnkled his
