of gold and precious stones was solemnly thrown overboard as
an offering to the gods who were supposed to inhabit the depths of the
lake, the people ashore meanwhile celebrating the sacrifice by dancing
to the accompaniment of musical instruments until the monarch returned
to the shore.

"Guatabita was a sacred lake, and was the recognised receptacle for
votive offerings of enormous value upon every possible occasion, and it
must therefore at this day contain wealth beyond the dreams of avarice,
several attempts to secure which have already been made; and it was on
the shore of this lake that the golden city of Manoa was at first
supposed to be situated.

"Of course, we know now that such was not the case, for the lake has
been often visited, and no traces of the city have been found; but
Guatabita was the original objective of the seekers of El Dorado.

"When at length it was conclusively demonstrated that Manoa was not
situated upon the shore of Lake Guatabita, its existence began to be
doubted for a while; but the belief, and the desire to discover it, were
revived somewhere about the middle of the 16th century by a
circumstantial story related by one Martinez, a lieutenant of Diego de
Ordaz, who declared that, having been shipwrecked, he was taken inland
to the city--which he called Omoa--and there entertained in regal
fashion by El Dorado himself. So circumstantial and full of gorgeous
detail was his story, that his chief Ordaz himself undertook the quest;
but the search resulted only in disappointment, as did that of many
others, including your own Sir Walter Raleigh.

"Now, the mistake made by all those people was, to my mind, that they
did not look for Manoa in the right place. Their very eagerness misled
them. So hungry were they for wealth that any old story was good enough
to start them off upon a wild goose chase. I am not hungry for wealth;
I have more of it than, with my moderate desires, I know what to do
with. I am not a multi-millionaire, but I have quite enough to enable
me to gratify all my cravings, of which the predominant ones are
exploration and hunting. I also have a hankering to ferret out secrets;
and the secret, which has haunted me for years is that connected with
the city of Manoa. Did or did it not exist? That is what I want to
find out. For years I have been digging and delving after every scrap
of information that I could possibly get track of upon the subject; and
you would