Don Zamorra was old, nearly as old as I am now; and as I speedily discovered, he had passed the greater part of his life in Spanish America, where he had held high office under the crown.  He could hardly talk about anything else, in fact, and once he began to discourse about his former greatness and the marvels of the Indies (as South and Central America were then sometimes called) he never knew when to stop.  He had crossed the Andes and seen the Amazon, sailed down the Orinoco and visited the mines of Potosi and Guanajuata, beheld the fiery summit of Cotopaxi, and peeped down the smoky crater of Acatenango.  He told of fights with Indians and wild animals, of being lost in the forest, and of perilous expeditions in search of gold and precious stones.  When Zamorra spoke of gold his whole attitude changed, the fires of his youth blazed up afresh, his face glowed with excitement, and his eyes sparkled with greed.  At these times I saw in him a true type of the old Spanish Conquestadores, who would baptize a cacique to save him from hell one day, and kill him and loot his treasure the next.

Don Alberto had, moreover, a firm belief in the existence of the fabled El Dorado, and of the city of Manoa, with its resplendent house of the sun, its hoards of silver and gold, and its gilded king.  Thousands of adventurers had gone forth in search of these wonders, and thousands had perished in the attempt to find them.  Senor Zamorra had sought El Dorado on the banks of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro; others, near the source of the Rio Grande and the Maranon; others, again, among the volcanoes of Salvador and the canons of the Cordilleras.  Zamorra believed that it lay either in the wilds of Guiana, or the unexplored confines of Peru and the Brazils.

He had heard of and believed even greater wonders—­of a stream on the Pacific coast of Mexico, whose pebbles were silver, and whose sand was gold; of a volcano in the Peruvian Cordillera, whose crater was lined with the noblest of metals, and which once in every hundred years ejected, for days together, diamonds, and rubies, and dust of gold.

“If that volcano could only be found,” said the don, with a convulsive clutching of his bony fingers, and a greedy glare in his aged eyes.  “If that volcano could only be found!  Why, it must be made of gold, and covered with precious stones!  The man who found it would be the richest in all the world—­richer than all the people in the world put together!”

“Did you ever see it, Don Alberto?” I asked.

“Did I ever see it?” he cried, uplifting his withered hands.  “If I had seen that volcano you would never have seen me, but you would have heard of me.  I had it from an Indio whose father once saw it with his own eyes; but I was too old, too old”—­sighing—­“to go on the quest.  To undertake such an enterprise a man should be in the prime of life and go alone.  A single companion, even though he were your own brother, might be fatal; for what virtue could be proof against so great a temptation—­millions of diamonds and a mountain of gold?”