The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes

The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes

Two dreams have persistently haunted the imagination of man since dreams began. You find them in all mythologies, and, perhaps most dramatically, in the Arabian Nights: the dream of the Water of Immortality, and the dream of the Golden City. Within recent timesthat is, during the sixteenth centuryboth were lifted out of the region of fairy lore, and men as far from dreamers, in the ordinary sense, as the conquistador Ponce de Leon and Sir Walter Raleigh raised them into the sphere of something like Elizabethan practical politics. Whether or not Ponce de Leon did actually discover the Fountain of Eternal Youth on the Bimini Islands concerns us but incidentally here. At all events, he seems to have died without drinking of it; as death on the scaffold was the penalty for Raleighs failure to discover El Dorado. So practically had the courts of Elizabeth and James regarded the dream of the Golden City, and so firm had been Raleighs own belief in it. Though Raleighs name is most conspicuously and tragically connected with it, of course it had been Spanish adventurers for several generations beforeexploring that Spanish Main which they had already, and in romance forever, made their ownwho had given that dream its local habitation and its name. Martinez had been the first to tell how, having drifted on the coast of Guiana, he had been taken inland to a city called Manoa,[xii] whose king was in alliance with the Incas. Manoa, said he, to opened mouths and wondering eyes, on his return to Spain, was literally built, walls and roofs, houses big and little, of silver and gold. His tale, garnished with many other mysterious matters, soon speeded expedition after expedition, dreaming across those ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 42699
Author: Smyth, Clifford
Release Date: May 13, 2013
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Illustrator: Russom, R. G