Much of his story, as he told it, was decidedly vague. In the main outline, however, it was simple enough, although ending in a mystery that he was unable to clear up.
Three years ago, it seems, David went to work on a project based on a legend belonging to prehistoric America. Traditions of the immense wealth and the civilization found in certain parts of South America by the Spanish conquerors had always fascinated him. And of all these traditions the one telling of El Dorado, the Gilded Man, interested him most.
From the early South American chronicles he learned that, within a few years of Pizarro’s discovery of Peru, three other explorers, starting independently from points on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, after months of perilous adventure, reached a great tableland in the Upper Andes, where Bogota, the capital of Colombia, now stands. It was “El Dorado” who drew these explorers thither. From the Indians on the coast they had heard stories of the great Man of Gold, who lived among the mountains of the interior and who possessed treasure so vast that all the wealth of the rest of the world could not equal it. Arrived in this mysterious region, they found, not El Dorado, but a superior race of people, somewhat like the ancient Peruvians, showing, in the barbaric splendor of their temples and palaces, every evidence of wealth and culture. These people, however, known as the Chibchas from their worship of the god Chibchacum, were suspicious of the Spaniards. A war of conquest followed, in which thousands of the natives were massacred and their finest temples and monuments destroyed. Sajipa, the Chibcha king, was subjected to the cruelest torture by his conquerors in their effort to find out from him where he had hidden his treasure. But he proved hero enough to suffer martyrdom rather than reveal the secret. For this he was put to death, and the Spaniards contented themselves with the trivial amount of gold and emeralds extorted from his subjects. They then established themselves in colonies on the Plains of Bogota. The climate was delightful, the land fertile and, as they soon discovered, rich in minerals. From the few surviving Indians they learned some of the native legends. In one of these, the legend of El Dorado, they believed they had the clew to the treasure they had been seeking. This legend was mixed up with the ancient mythology of the Chibchas, and had played a leading part in their religious ceremonial for centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. It was as follows:
On the edge of the Bogota tableland, not many miles from the city that is to-day the capital of Colombia, there is a lake, Guatavita—the Sacred Lake of the Chibchas. Geologically, it is a pocket formed by a cluster of spurs near the foot of a conical mountain. It is small, circular in shape, and reaches a central depth of 214 feet. Beneath this lake, according to tradition, lived the national god, Chibchacum. To keep on the right side of this god, to make atonement for the people, a semi-annual feast was observed—the Feast of El Dorado.
Twice a year the king of the Chibchas, in celebrating this Feast, was floated on a raft to the center of the Sacred Lake. He was then stripped of his royal robes, his body anointed with oil and covered with gold dust. Glittering in the sunlight this Gilded Man stood at the edge of the royal raft and was saluted by his subjects, who encircled the shores of the lake, each one bearing an offering of gold and emeralds. Then, as if dazzled by the splendor of their monarch, the people reverently turned their faces away from him and, at a signal from the priests, threw their treasures over their heads into the lake, while the Gilded Man, followed by the heaps of precious stones and metals which were with him on the raft, plunged into its waters. No god ever received such a shower of wealth at his shrine as was thus lavished twice a year, for centuries, on the god Chibchacum. All this wealth, except an insignificant sum that the Spaniards rescued, is to-day, according to the legend, at the bottom of Guatavita.
Besides this semi-annual tribute, it was rumored that at the time of Sajipa’s murder the entire remaining treasure of the Chibchas had been thrown into the lake, not as a votive offering, but as a means of hiding it from the Spaniards. It took fifty men, so runs tradition, to carry the gold dust to Guatavita from the king’s treasury alone. All the minor chieftains of the kingdom made a similar sacrifice of their possessions on this occasion.
Years afterwards, the Spaniards, stirred by these stories, attempted to drain the lake. This meant the piercing of earth and rock walls nearly nine hundred feet thick and proved too great an undertaking for the engineering machinery that they had in those days. But before they gave up the work they succeeded in lowering the level of the lake sufficiently to recover a certain amount of treasure. Since that time the secret of Guatavita has remained undisturbed. To solve it David went to Bogota. Raoul Arthur, who had done most of the practical planning for the expedition, went with him.
The motives of the two men engaged in the enterprise were not exactly similar. David, according to what he told Leighton, hoped to solve an archæological riddle and to study a hitherto lost people whose prehistoric civilization equaled that of their neighbors, the Incas of Peru. Arthur, on the contrary, whose fortune was still to be made, regarded it frankly as a mining scheme that promised fabulous returns in money, with a comparatively small amount of risk and labor. The two points of view were not antagonistic, and for a time the friends worked amicably enough together. In Bogota they easily secured from the government the necessary permit to drain Guatavita. But the attractions of the Colombian capital, the hospitality with which they were received, delayed the actual working out of their plans. Fascinated by the romance of this picturesque city and charmed by the unique race of mountaineers inhabiting it, David postponed the prosaic task of mining, while Raoul became absorbed in studies relating to their proposed venture, meeting people with whom his companion seldom came in contact. Lake Guatavita and its secret was thus, for a time, forgotten—at least by David.
When the social gayeties of the capital were exhausted, he took up in earnest the work he had planned to do. He bought a full equipment of the best mining machinery and hired a large number of laborers. But the enterprise proved more difficult than he expected. The Spaniards, who had worked at the problem three centuries before, were bound to fail on account of their lack of engineering machinery. To empty Lake Guatavita, they tried to cut through the mountain which formed one of the containing walls of that body of water. Under the circumstances their partial success was amazing. The V-shaped gash they cut through the mountain is a proof of their industry, even if it failed of its full purpose. But it did lower the level of the lake—although this result was followed by an unforeseen catastrophe. The sudden release of the water through the channel opened for it left the precipitous shores of the lake unsupported. These shores then caved in, covering whatever treasure there might be in the center of the basin with masses of rock and earth, and thus placing a new obstacle in the way of the future miner.
David and Raoul took the problem from a different angle. They abandoned the old cuttings of the Spaniards and planned a tunnel through the thinnest part of the mountain to the bottom of the lake. In this way they hoped to control the outflow of water, after which, they calculated, the recovery of the treasure would be a mere matter of placer mining. To do this they had boring machines and dynamite—modern giants, of whose existence the old Spaniards never dreamed.