Looking for Lust in All the Wrong Places
"'Over the
Mountains of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,' the shade replied,
'If you seek for El Dorado.'"
(El Dorado by Edgar Allan Poe)
El Dorado, the fabled
city of gold-sought by adventurers since the 16th
century, was rumored to be a land of unimaginable riches, a place for
which men
have died for, killed for, sold their very souls to find. A lieutenant
for
Francisco Pizarro claimed to have found it between the Orinoco
and Amazon Rivers.
Sir Walter Raleigh twice visited Guiana and
even wrote
about it. Yet, for all this, El Dorado
remains only a legend.
A story is told of a South American prince who was
powdered each day with gold dust (El Dorado
means "the gilt one"). Extravagant as that may be, neither the wilds
of the Amazon nor the remote mountain fortresses of the Incas seem
lands of
gold, even today...except perhaps to contending environmental and
industrial
interests.
Only Coronado
seems to have had the right idea...or at least
the right direction. The problem was that Spain
didn't really know what it had. For as time
would prove, the golden country wasn't to be found in sweltering
jungles taken
by the might of conquistadors, but in another far-away land dotted with
Spanish
missions...California.
Acknowledgments:
3, 4, 25
©
Russ Brown, 1998