o insignificance.

Like all such myths, this had a foundation in fact. The Colchian ramskin
was a poetic fancy of the gold mines of the Caucasus; but there really
_was_ a gilded man. The story of him and what he led to is a fairy tale
that has the advantage of being true. It is an enormously complicated
theme; but, thanks to Bandelier's final unravelling of it, the story can
now be told intelligibly,--as it has not been popularly told heretofore.

A number of years ago there was found in the lagoon of Siecha, in New
Granada, a quaint little group of statuary; it was of the rude and
ancient Indian workmanship, and even more precious for its ethnologic
interest than for its material, which was pure gold. This rare
specimen--which is still to be seen in a museum in Berlin--is a golden
raft, upon which are grouped ten golden figures of men. It represents a
strange custom which was in prehistoric times peculiar to the Indians of
the village of Guatavita, on the highlands of New Granada. That custom
was this: On a certain great day one of the chiefs of the village used
to smear his naked body with a gum, and then powder himself from head to
foot with pure gold-dust. He was the Gilded Man. Then he was taken out
by his companions on a raft to the middle of the lake, which was near
the village, and leaping from the raft the Gilded Man used to wash off
his precious and wonderful covering and let it sink to the bottom of the
lake. It was a sacrifice for the benefit of the village. This custom is
historically established, but it had been broken up more than thirty
years before the story was first heard of by Europeans,--namely, the
Spaniards in Venezuela in 1527. It had not been voluntarily abandoned by
the people of Guatavita. The warlike Muysca Indians of Bogota had ended
it by swooping down upon the village of Guatavita and nearly
exterminating its inhabitants. Still, the sacrifice had been a fact; and
at that enormous distance and in those uncertain days the Spaniards
heard of it as still a fact. The story of the Gilded Man, _El Hombre
Dorado_, shortened to _El Dorado_, was too startling not to make an
impression. It became a household word, and thenceforward was a lure to
all who approached the northern coast of South America. We may wonder
how such a tale (which had already become a myth in 1527, since the fact
upon which it was founded had ceased) could hold its own for two hundred
and fifty years without being fully explode