the Indians who come and go thither. As soon as the said volcano disappears, the desert islands are reached. Going in among them, after two days the large island which seems to be a continent is sighted, and what lies to the west is still to be discovered."

There are elements in this story, such as the communal houses and the ornate canoes, borrowed from actual expeditions to the South Seas which the earlier legend itself had launched. What these expeditions had set out to find was a continent about two thousand miles to the west, which stretched northward for three thousand miles from the latitude of Tierra del Fuego to 15 degrees south, or almost on a line with Callao; a domain about the size of that afterward discovered and named Australia, but lying on the near side of the Pacific. Rumors of such a continent passed from tavern gossip to palace conferences. Sarmiento de Gamboa had gathered and analyzed Inca traditions of Pacific islands and the learned men of the colony assumed that a continental mass lay behind them. So in 1567 the governor of Peru dispatched two small ships with one hundred and fifty men and put his youthful nephew, Alvarado de Mendana, in command.

An incredible thing happened. These frail vessels, provisioned for a voyage of two thousand miles, drove westward without sighting land for seven thousand miles. In two months they crossed the width of the Pacific, making their land-fall in the East Indies. For six months the crews explored the capes, creeks, and jungles of a group of islands flanking New Guinea on the east. Then the ships started back and were off Callao twenty months after they had left it. They brought no gold, but stories of "a naked, cheerful people of a bright reddish colour"-in reality, head-hunting cannibals, to this day the most of men.

savage

Nearly thirty years went by before another expedition was undertaken, and meanwhile legend was at work. It gave the distant group the name it bears upon the map. These were called the Isles of Solomon, says Lopez Vaz, "to the ende that the Spaniards, supposing them to bee those Isles from whence Solomon fetched gold to adorne the temple at Jerusalem, might bee the more desirous to goe and inhabit the same." But the

Portuguese writer adds that because Drake and other raiders had entered the South Seas, it was determined not to settle them, so that interloping vessels Molucca-bound might have no succor on the way.

In 1595 Mendana, now middle aged, undertook to colonize the islands, going out with four ships and 368 emigrants―men, women and children, his own wife among them. Then another amazing thing happened. The Spaniards could not find the Solomons. They discovered the Marquesas, and in the island of Santa Cruz founded a short-lived colony where Mendana died and whence the expedition went forth again to disaster. Quiros, Mendana's great lieutenant, returning to Peru, represented to the viceroy that the islands come upon by his chief must screen an unknown continent, as in fact they did. In 1605 he was sent out to find them. He discovered the Society Islands, the Duff group and the New Hebrides, but nowhere was there trace of the Isles of Solomon.

Dissolved into fable, for two centuries they were lost to geography. In the waterside taverns of Peru, people still talked of them. But it had become a maxim of the viceroys to treat the discovery as a romance, and learned men concurred. The group was erased from the maps of the world. Although it includes ten great islands stretching for six hundred miles in an almost unbroken barrier across the track of navigators, and although the first Spanish expedition brought back information so detailed that every headland and harbor which Mendana passed has since been identified, yet for two hundred years nobody could find the archipelago. When it was rediscovered it was from the other direction. Carteret and Bougainville, rounding Africa and entering the South Seas in the latter part of the eighteenth century, came upon islands which were found to be the lost lands of Spain.

The Sepulchers of Zenu

There are significant words in Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana. Here, he says, "commanders that shoot at honour and abundance shall find more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru." Moreover, it is virgin soil: "the graves

have not bene opened for golde, nor the Images puld downe out of their temples." Spain's hunger for gold pursued the Indians into their sanctuaries, and even into their graves.

The Bachelor Enciso and Balboa, each in turn commander of Darien, sought golden treasures, which, as report ran, Indian piety had heaped in the wilderness.

Enciso went forth to sack the Sepulchers of Zenu. This province lay some twenty leagues west of Cartagena. From its steeps the rains washed gold down in such profusion that the natives caught in nets nuggets as big as eggs. Zenu was also the cemetery for all the tribes of the country. For ages they had brought their dead thither for burial, and deposited golden ornaments with the bodies in the tombs. The soil, the Spanish lawyer thought, must have become incredibly rich from this long accumulation. It was no sacrilege to plunder the dead, for were these not pagans, buried according to the rites of an idolatrous faith?

Landing on the coast of Zenu, Enciso found an army under two caciques drawn up to oppose him. The lawyer in him prompted him to put his opponents in the wrong before appealing to arms. So he had a formal statement read to the two chiefs. The colloquy which followed, and which he reports himself, is one of the most interesting incidents in all the contacts of white men with savages. The statement recited that there was one God who ruled in heaven, that in the Pope He had a vicar who ruled on earth, and that the latter had awarded Zenu to the King of Spain. The Indians replied that they accepted the sovereignty of God in heaven, but nothing further. The Pope, they said, must have been drunk, to give away what did not belong to him, and the King somewhat mad, to ask of him what was not his to give. If the King came to take it, they would cut off his head and set it on a stake; and they pointed to other stakes on which heads were set.

Whereupon there was fighting, in which, Enciso says, the Indians had the worse of it. But two of his men, slightly wounded by poisoned arrows, died raving; the country was hostile beyond what he had anticipated, and his force small. He went away without rifling the sepulchers.

The Temple of Dobayba

Balboa, succeeding Enciso at Darien, heard of a province called Dobayba forty leagues away on the banks of the Atrato. It was named either from a goddess or from an Indian princess to whom, after death, divine honors were paid. Her worship was conducted in a great temple, whither natives came with their offerings. At stated times the caciques of remote provinces sent a golden tribute, together with slaves for sacrifice.

Superstition and fear piled up treasure at this shrine. At one time its worship had been neglected. Then a great drought fell upon the land, the springs and rivers dried up, and a scourge of death was visited upon the neglectful nations. The survivors renewed their zeal and redoubled their offerings of slaves and gold. Thus from generation to generation the wealth of many peoples drained into the blood-stained temple. The prospect of spoiling a heathen shrine profaned by human sacrifice and piled high with idolatrous gold presented itself not as a desecration but as a duty.

On his first journey Balboa mistook a deserted frontier village for the temple town. When he went again, it was at the behest of Pedrarias, who had been made governor of the colony, and whose jealousy prompted him to set Balboa a task that might bring disgrace. The quest of Dobayba was now deemed an enterprise of romantic promise but of high hazard. The way thither led through tribes of bold and crafty savages. In the dreary fens lurked animals to be dreaded, including monstrous importations from classic myth. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed above the stagnant water, sinister lizards crawled on the banks, crocodiles haunted the ooze. Dragons couched there, so said report, and huge bats flitted by on vampire errands. Peter Martyr even mentions two harpies. A later age was to discover the enigmatic White Indians. Rather than enter this accursed region, the coast natives were wont to shun the direct routes and travel the steep paths of the mountains.

Balboa was to win neither gold nor glory upon his forbidding mission. Passing up the Gulf of Oraba and into the river Atrato with a fleet of canoes, the expedition was ambushed by Indian canoes, losing half its number. Its leader, wounded,

made shore with the remainder and at sunset began a crestfallen retreat to Darien.

The temple of Dobayba-if there was a temple-was left inviolate, to receive the gold and shed the blood of heathen until the tropical forest swept in and buried it in a green oblivion.

Other Quests

Of certain other Spanish quests less has been recorded, because they were incidental to larger undertakings or were conducted by small parties of adventurers, monks, or treasureseekers, rather than by columns of troops sent out by provincial governments. Pious men sought the Terrestrial Paradise toward the headwaters of the Orinoco. From all points of the compass explorers hunted for the Kingdom of Women. Sometimes the conquistadors reiterated their own exploits, as when Federmann looked for the House of the Sun in the Colombian Andes, although under the name of the Temple of the Sun it had already fallen to Pizarro. The adventure of the Golden Chain was attempted on several occasions, parties of Spaniards undertaking to drain the crater lake of Urcos, into which, tradition said, had been flung a massive chain of gold long enough to encircle the great square at Cuzco.

The quest of the Cradle of Gold is of the last century, and here the magic of a name again wrought its spell, two hundred years after the feet of the conquistadors had passed. Bingham, who climbed to this ruined mountain fortress a dozen years ago, believes that Choquequirau is just a name of Indian poetry, misunderstood. Seen from a distance, the ridge on which it lies resembles a hammock, and its only gold may be that which the setting sun flings upon it. But the name itself, and the vagueness of knowledge as to its last defenders, led to various attempts to reach the ruin from the valley below. One party brought back reports of rock-built "palaces, paved squares, temples, prisons and baths." The prefect of the Peruvian department of Apurimac, using a company of soldiers and Indian carriers, built a way across the rocky gorges and up the steep mountain side to Choquequirau. This, it is thought, was the eyrie of the last Inca-neither temple town nor treasure house, but a frontier fortress of the long ago.