Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/123

Rh and he fell under the discharge of musketry. His head was cut off and was exhibited at Tocuyo in an iron cage. His memory survives to the present time in Venezuela as that of an evil spirit; and when at night the jack-o'-lanterns dance over the marshy plains, the solitary wanderer crosses himself and whispers, "The soul of the tyrant Aguirre." "With this closes the account of the series of expeditions which we undertook to describe in connection with the legend of the gilded man. The story justifies our comparison of the vision of the dorado after his real home had been conquered with a mirage, "enticing, deceiving, and leading men to destruction."

Notwithstanding the tragical consequences which the search for this phantom invariably entailed, it remained long fixed like an evil spell upon the northeastern half of the South American continent. Martin de Proveda tried and failed, in 1556, to reach Omagua and the "provinces of the dorado" Diego de Cerpa, in 1569, and Pedro Malaver de Silva, in 1574, met their deaths at the mouths of the Orinoco. There Antonio de Berreo, after he had fruitlessly marched through the whole interior of Venezuela, fell a prisoner into the hands of the English in 1582. The great expedition of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 only got as far as the Salto Carom. In the meanwhile the locality of the legend, as Humboldt has remarked, kept shifting farther to the east, till it took final refuge in Guyana, "in the periodically overflowed plains between the rivers Rupununi, Essequibo, and Branco"—but shrunken at the same time to a purely geographical myth of Lake Parime.