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It was well parapeted near the sea, and it had heavy cuttings in the white tosca, a rock somewhat resembling the calcaire grossier of the Paris basin. This light pumice-like stone, occasionally forming a conglomerate or pudding, and slightly effervescing with acids, is fertile where soft, and where hard quite sterile. Hereabouts lay Gando, one of the earliest forts built by the Conquistadores.
It was there that Philip von Huten first sought El Dorado, and with a handful of men fought the battle of Omaguas, so celebrated in the sixteenth century. In separating what is fabulous from the narratives of the Conquistadores, we cannot fail to recognize in the names preserved on the same spots a certain basis of historic truth.
After the interruption of the Middle Ages the activity is taken up again by the Italian cities, the Hanseatic League, etc.; in the fifteenth century with the great maritime discoveries; in the sixteenth century by the Conquistadores, hungering for adventure and wealth; later on, by the mixed expeditions, whose expenses are defrayed by merchants in common, and which are often accompanied by armed bands that fight for them; lastly comes the incorporation of great companies that have been wittily dubbed "Conquistadores of the counting-house."
There were no Spaniards living with Manco at that time to report any such outrage on the bodies of Captain Villadiego's unfortunate men. Probably the conquistadores supposed that Manco did what the Spaniards would have done under similar circumstances.
I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and hang him round your neck, so you sleep well. Oh, yes! They, like the lotus flower, make your trouble forgotten. It smell so like the waters of Lethe, and of that fountain of youth that the Conquistadores sought for in the Floridas, and find him all too late." Whilst he was speaking, Lucy had been examining the flowers and smelling them.
Of this expedition James Jeffrey Roche says, in his "Byways of War," which is of all books published about Walker the most intensely and fascinatingly interesting and complete: "Years afterward the peon herdsman or prowling Cocupa Indian in the mountain by-paths stumbled over the bleaching skeleton of some nameless one whose resting-place was marked by no cross or cairn, but the Colts revolver resting beside his bones spoke his country and his occupation the only relic of the would-be conquistadores of the nineteenth century."
Then came Pizarro and the bigoted conquistadores. The native chiefs faced the necessity of saving whatever was possible of the ancient religion. The Spaniards coveted gold and silver.
Late in the evening, after passing through a coco plantation, we reached the foot of the mountain and found shelter from a tempest with a kind old woman; to whom my servants lied so shamelessly that, when the rain had abated, we were, in spite of our failure, conducted with torches to Tambong, where we found the palm-grove round the little hamlet magically illuminated with bright bonfires of dry coconut-leaves in honor of the Conquistadores del Iriga; and where I was obliged to remain for the night, as the people were too timorous or too lazy to cross the rough water of the lake.
It was first introduced into Spain in 1520; but chocolate, on account of the monopoly of the Conquistadores, was for a long time secretly prepared on the other side of the ocean. In 1580, however, it was in common use in Spain, though it was so entirely unknown in England that, in 1579, an English captain burnt a captured cargo of it as useless.
But to those who are familiar with its vast expanse of plain and horizon, its rugged sierras, its wild desolate mesas and solitary peaks of half-decayed mountains its tawny stretches of desert marked with the occasional skeletons of animal and human remains its golden wealth of sunshine and opalescent skies, and have felt the brooding death-like silence which seems to hold as in a spell all things living as well as dead, this land becomes one of mystery and enchantment a mute witness of some unknown or forgotten past when the children of men were young, whose secrets it still withholds, and with whose dust is mingled not only that of unnumbered and unknown generations of men, but that of Montezuma and the hardy daring Conquistadores of old Spain.
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