bishop of Rome of an island with a youth-restoring spring some three hundred leagues north of Hispaniola.

The Spanish cavalier set sail with three ships in 1512, in search of Bimini. There were nearly seven hundred islands and islets in the Bahamas and his journey was through a labyrinth. For a part of the voyage he had the strangest, and perhaps the most fitting, of pilots. To a clump of islands near the Lucayos he gave the name of La Vieja or the Old Woman group because he found them without inhabitants save one ancient woman. Her he took aboard to help guide him through the sea passages. He found Florida, but he did not find Bimini, which was discovered later by his captain, Juan Perez de Ortubia, the sagacious old woman directing him to its shore. The water there was like any other water. Ponce de Leon, however, escaped the disabilities of age. A poisoned Indian arrow launched from a Florida bow did for him when he was about sixty-one.

Before his death, the quest for a fountain from which one might quaff the draught of youth had been broadened to include a River Jordan of rejuvenating baths. This was somewhere on the peninsula of Florida, where for half a century red men and white searched for it, bathing in every stream, lagoon, and swamp they found, in the hope that the magic water, in some sudden transformation scene, might betray its whereabouts.

Though they did not know it, the Spaniards themselves brought to the New World the legend of the fountain of youth and the name of Bimini, as well as that of the River Jordan. Wiener has traced each step. In 1493, a year before the Pope made the line of demarcation between the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, he had given to Spain the newly discovered lands on condition that the natives should be baptized in the Catholic faith. Amerigo Vespucci falsely reported that, in compliance therewith, a fountain of baptism had been placed on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Peter Martyr in his Decade of 1511 called this the fonte perenni, but the cartographer misread his Latin, and on the map attached to his work a coast line north of Cuba is called isla de beimeni parte. Thus the perennial fountain became Bimini, and the fiction of a Christian baptismal font revived a pagan myth.

The Enchanted City of the Cæsars

The quest of the Enchanted City of the Cæsars was the southernmost adventure of the dreaming mind of Spain. It was prosecuted along the slopes of the southern Andes and the Patagonian plains beyond that mysterious and desolate region which made so deep an impression upon Darwin. Over the remote prairies, peopled only by huanacos and roving bands of tall savages, Spanish commands hunted for a capital which the natives called Trapalanda, and which, according to the oath of those who said they had seen it, was as great as ancient Nineveh and as populous as Peking.

Outbound to the Moluccas, the story ran, a vessel belonging to the bishop of Palancia was shipwrecked in the Straits of Magellan. The captain of the stranded craft, Sebastian de Arguello, found himself on the Patagonian coast with three thousand miles of mountain and plain between his little band and the outpost of Spanish power at Cuzco. Followed by about two hundred soldiers and sailors, thirty adventurers, twentythree married women, and three priests, he struck boldly into the heart of the pampas, moving northward. When the company reached a region of lakes and meadows rimmed by snowy summits resolution was taken to found there an independent state aloof from the perturbations of the world. Other fugitives had reached this inviting spot before the Spaniards-a numerous native people flying from the wreck of Peru.

It would seem from the rapid growth of the city which was said to have arisen upon the shore of Lake Nahuelhuapi that red men and white mingled their blood. The first report of the austral capital reached Concepcion in Chile, in 1557.

The Spanish settlements were led to picture a great, rich city in the south. A strong wall ran around it, and over it the roving Indians of the prairies could see reddish roofs that gleamed as with gold. The houses were of cut stone and those who had been within them spoke of beds, chairs, and table service made of precious ores. The central edifice in the capital was a noble church roofed with silver, and from it were decreed and regulated the pompous festivals of the ecclesiastical year.

Wishing to keep their isolation inviolate, its inhabitants had

an understanding with the Indians that the secret of the city should be told to none. But when it received the name of La Ciudad encantada de los Cæsares (the enchanted City of the Cæsars), it was a presage that from all the Spanish settlements of the south, expeditions should go forth to seek it out, for the very words were a challenge to the imagination.

It was called the city of the Cæsars because the men who founded it had been subjects of Charles V of Spain, whom men had styled the Cæsar in recognition of his world-wide dominion. It was called enchanted because of the beauty of its lake setting and the splendors within its walls. Soon its people became known as the Cæsars, and the men who conducted expeditions to reach them as the Cæsaristas.

There were other motives for the quest beside the golden treasure to be found there and the wish to visit a clime so fair that none died save of old age. Here were a kindred people, cut off from their fellows, and, it might be, lapsing decade after decade into a splendid barbarism. The purity of their Christian faith was in danger of corruption from every sort of heathen error. Civilization and religion were both concerned in the rescue of this fascinating creole capital, which had done so well by itself and yet needed to renew its contacts with the world. So said the Spaniard wherever fortune had placed him—in the homeland, in Mexico, in the Philippines, and most of all in the colonies of the southern Cordilleras and the eastern plains.

There were a number of small expeditions to seek the legendary city, and three of importance. Diego Flores de Leon reached Lake Nahuelhuapi from the Pacific side, heard of savage armies massed on his front, and went no further. Half a century later came the Jesuit father, Nicolas Mascardi. Fearing that the southern capital might have forgotten the mother tongue of Spain, he collaborated with another churchman in a letter which was translated into seven languages-Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Chilean, Puelche, and Poya. The letter was sent ahead by an Indian courier after he reached the shores of Nahuelhuapi. Hearing a report that the site of the city was near the Atlantic, he crossed the continent, and then turned southward toward the Straits of Magellan, falling at last to an Indian arrow. This was in 1673. More than a century after