ained his freedom and returned to Trinidad, and
told his story, many other adventurers set out in quest of Manoa; but
none so much as saw it save only Pedro de Urra. He, after incredible
labours, at length arrived at a mountain peak whence, looking down,
far away in the distance he could just descry the shining roofs of
palaces and golden domes of Inca temples, wherein, he was told, were
stored gold images of women and children more beautiful than God had
yet wrought into flesh and blood. But his strength was spent and his
troops were famished, also the Incas' armies were moving forward to
check his advance; therefore he had to retreat, and to return to the
seacoast, where he fretted away his life in dreaming of the
splendours of which he had only just had sight. Fifty years later
Berreo, governor of Trinidad, set out from Nuevo Reyno with seven
hundred horse and slaves, and descended the Cassanar river, bound upon
the same errand. What with fever and poisonous water he lost many of
his men and cattle, so that, when he reached the Province of Amapaia,
he had but one hundred and twenty soldiers left, and these were sick
and dying; and so he also was forced to abandon his search. And this
man Raleigh captured, and from him extorted his secrets, when he
sailed to discover and conquer El Dorado for Queen Elizabeth, having
in his company Jacob Whiddon, the English pirate, and George Gifford
who was captain of the Lion's Whelp.

"All the way across the ocean they studied the records of the
adventurers who had sought before them, till they had them all by
memory; for they hoped to find those same wonders which Lopez says
that Pizarro found in the first home of the Incas: 'A royal city where
all the vessels of the emperor's house, table, and kitchen, were of
gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and
hardness of metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which
seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the
beasts, birds, trees, and herbs that earth produceth; and of all the
fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also
ropes, budgets, chests, and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of
billets of gold, that seemed wood marked out to burn. Finally, there
was nothing in his country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold.
Yea, and they say, that the Incas had a garden of pleasure in an
island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves when they