The King of the Chibchas, amongst whom power and property passed by law of inheritance from uncle to nephew, was called the Zipa. His power as a monarch was absolute, but to attain the dignity of what we should nowadays call Crown Prince, and to become in due course King, it was not enough to be a nephew, or even to be the right nephew. The prospective heir to the throne had to qualify himself by passing through an ordeal which Princes of other nations and other times would certainly find most obnoxious. He had to live in a cave for six years, fasting the whole time, with limited rations, barely enough to sustain life. No meat or salt were to be eaten during the whole time. He must see no one, with the exception of his male servants, nor was he even allowed to gaze upon the sun. Only after sunset and before sunrise might he issue from his cave. After this ordeal he was qualified, but should he have so much as cast his eyes upon a woman during that period, his rights to the throne were lost. The consecration, so to speak, of the Zipa took the form of a most elaborate ceremony. The prospective Zipa would betake himself—being carried upon a special sort of frame so arranged that twenty men standing under it could lift it upon their shoulders—to one of the five sacred lakes that still exist in the plateau, generally to the lake of Guatavita. There, stripped naked, his body was smeared with a resinous substance, upon which gold-dust was sprinkled in large quantities. Naturally, after this process the man appeared like unto a very statue of gold. Two other high dignitaries or chiefs, called Caciques, as nude as the Zipa, would go with him upon a raft of twisted reeds and slowly paddle into the centre of the lake. All round the shore was a dense crowd, burning a species of aromatic herb which produced clouds of smoke. On every hand was heard the sound of music, or, rather, of noises representing the music customary at all ceremonies. On the raft, at the feet of the Zipa, lay a huge pile of gold and emeralds. Each of his companions, too, had gold and emeralds, wherewith to propitiate the god in whose honour the ceremony was performed. One of the chiefs in the raft would raise a white flag and wave it. The noise on the shores became deafening, whilst the gilded Zipa threw into the lake all the gold and all the emeralds; then his companions would follow his example. When all the gold and emeralds on the raft had been cast into the lake, the people ashore also made their offerings of gold. Thus, after six years’ fasting, the Zipa was (so to put it) anointed or qualified for kingship. On reaching the land the period of abstinence came to an end, and now that the Zipa was full-fledged Crown Prince, or Zipa (if his predecessor should have chanced to die), his first act was to get gloriously drunk.
From the early days of the conquest, efforts were made to drain the five lakes, from which numerous samples of gold idols and roughly-worked gold have been recovered. Even recently a company was formed in England for that purpose. The tradition in this case being so universal, it seems rational to assume that vast treasures must lie at the bottom of these lakes, because the Chibchas were an ancient race, and their ceremonies must have been repeated during centuries. The country also is rich in emeralds and in gold—hence the belief in the large amount of treasure to be obtained from those lakes whose waters look so placid.
Some years ago in Bogotá an enthusiast, who sought to form a company for the purpose of draining one of the lakes, carried about with him a few samples of gold, idols and suchlike, which, so he said, had been brought to light by a man whom he named, a good diver, who plunged five times into the lake, and after each plunge brought up one of the specimens exhibited. He argued thus: The bottom of the lake must be practically studded with gold, since Mr. X. succeeded each time. There are millions in the lake, and all that is needed is a little money to drain it.
The argument seemed so strong, and the gold gleamed so bright in his hands, that he obtained numerous subscribers, until he had the misfortune to come across one of those sceptics impervious to reason, who, after listening to him, replied: ‘Yes, I have no doubt that there must be millions in the lake, since X. at each plunge brought out a bit of gold like those you show me; but what I cannot for the life of me understand is why he is not still plunging—it seems so easy!’ The tale went round the town, and the lake was not drained, nor has it been up to the present.
This gilding of the man is the germ of the legend of El Dorado, which has cost so much blood, and in search of which so many thousands and thousands of men have wandered during past centuries in all possible directions on their bootless quest.
CHAPTER III
Returning to the lake, and now gathering the information furnished by geology, whose silent annals are so carefully and truthfully recorded (being as they are beyond reach of man’s little contentions and petty adjustments), we find that the original lake covered an area of about seventy-five square miles, and attained great depths. Its placid waters, beating possibly for centuries against the environing rocks, have left their marks, from which it may be seen that in some places the depth was 120 feet, and in others 180.
We cannot fix the date of the break in the mountains which allowed the drain to occur. So far man has not succeeded in grasping with invariable accuracy the chronology of the admirable geological archives to which we have referred, and in matters of this kind a discrepancy of a few hundred years more or less is accepted as a trifle scarcely worth mentioning. And possibly this may be right. For man’s passage through life is so short that his conception of time cannot be applied to Nature, whose evolutions, though apparently protracted and very slow to see, in truth are sure to develop themselves harmoniously in every way, as to time inclusive.
But no matter how far back the draining of the great lake may have taken place, it had left its memory and impression, not only on the mountains and the rocks, but also in the minds of men. The legend ran thus: At one time there came among the Chibchas a man differing in aspect from the inhabitants of the plateau, a man from the East, the land where the sun rises, and from the low plains where the mighty rivers speed to the ocean. He had taught them the arts of peace, the cultivation of the soil, the division of time; he had established their laws, the precepts by which their life was to be guided, their form of government; in one word, he had been their apostle and legislator. His name was Bochica or Zuhe. He resembled in aspect the Europeans who invaded the country under Quesada.
It is asserted by a pious Spanish Bishop, who in the middle of the seventeenth century wrote the history of the discovery and conquest of the Chibcha kingdom, that the said Bochica was none other than the Apostle St. Bartholomew, as to whose final work and preachings there is (not to overstate the case) some obscurity. The good old Bishop states that, as the Christian faith, according to the Divine decree, was to be preached in every corner of the earth, it must have also been preached amongst the Chibchas, and that, as nothing was known with certainty about the final whereabouts of the Apostle Bartholomew, and he was not unlike the description made of Bochica by the Chibchas (which, by-the-by, was such that it might have fitted any white man with a long blonde beard), it is evident that the saint must have visited those Andine regions. Furthermore, he adds, there is a stone on one of the mountains, situated between the plateau of Bogotá and the eastern plains, which bears the footprints of the saint. This, to many people, is decisive, and I, for my part, am not going to gainsay it, since it serves two important ends. It explains the saint’s whereabouts in a most creditable and appropriate fashion, and it puts a definite end to all doubts concerning Bochica’s identity. We cannot be too grateful to those who thus afford pleasant explanations of matters which would otherwise be intricate and difficult, perhaps even impossible, of solution.