As an engineering problem, draining the lake seemed practicable and comparatively inexpensive. It is a deep, transparent pool, hardly more than a thousand feet wide, almost circular, and set like a jewel in a cup-like depression near the top of a cone-shaped peak, several hundred feet above the nearby plateau. The tunnel therefore had only to pierce the hill-side to enter the lake and let the water flow out to the plain below. It was estimated that the shaft had to be driven a distance of eleven hundred feet.
A small village of huts was built to shelter the engineers and laborers, and rock drilling machinery set up not far from the still visible remains of one of the shafts dug by the Spanish treasure seekers of the fifteenth century. No serious obstacles were encountered until the tunnel had tapped the bottom of the lake and the water began to run off through carefully regulated sluices. Then, as the surface lowered, and the submerged mud was exposed to the air, it solidified in a cement-like substance which was almost impossible to penetrate. The treasure must have sunk many feet deep in this mud during four or five centuries, and the workmen found it so baffling that operations were suspended. The promoters of the enterprise found this unexpected obstacle so much more than they had bargained for that they had to abandon it for lack of resources. In their turn they had been thwarted by the spirit of the gilded man, and the treasure of El Dorado is still beyond the grasp of its eager pursuers.
[[1]] The performance of these ceremonies is vouched for by Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita, Bishop of Panama; Pedro Simon, and other early Spanish historians, translated and quoted by A. F. Bandelier in his work, "The Gilded Man (El Dorado)." This version agrees with that described in the volume written by the modern historian, Dr. Liborio Zerda, professor of the University of Colombia, El Dorado, Estudio Historico, Ethnografico, Y Arqueologico.
[[2]] Translated by A. F. Bandelier.
[[3]] Oviedo, or Oviedo y Valdéz, royal histriographer, who witnessed the first return of Columbus to Spain in 1493. He was later a treasury officer at Darien, governor of Cartagena, and alcaide of the fort at Santo Domingo. He wrote the first general account of the discoveries in America, and it has remained a standard authority. His principal work is Historia natural y general de las Indias in fifty books.
[[4]] For the convenience of the reader the spelling has been modernized in this and the following extracts from Hakluyt.
[[5]] Martinez was the gunner or officer "who had charge of the munitions."
[[6]] Commonly spelled Huascar and Atalualpa.
[[7]] "Her father loved me, oft invited me, Still questioned me the story of my life
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have pass'd.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days
To the very moment that he bade me tell it:
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving incidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach
Of being taken by the insolent foe,
And sold to slavery,'of my redemption thence,
And portance in my travel's history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose head touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline."
—Shakespeare. (The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.)
[[8]] The date of the first English edition of Sir John Mandeville's book of travels was 1499. According to his own account he discovered this and other wonders in the kingdom of Ethiopia. The book was widely read, very popular in several languages, and was one of the earliest printed books, being published in Germany about 1475. Recent investigations have shown that almost the whole of the matter was cribbed from other authors, and that as a genuine explorer, Sir John Mandeville was the Dr. Frederick Cook of his age.