A party crossed to the main with the Adelantado and pushed a league into as tall and thick and shadowy a forest as ever we met in all our wanderings.  Here we found no village, but came suddenly, right in the wood, upon a very great thatched hut, and in it, upon a stone, lay in state a dead cacique.  He seemed long dead, but the body had not corrupted; it was saved by some knowledge such as had the Egyptians.  A crown of feathers rested upon the head and gold was about the neck.  Around the place stood posts and slabs of a dark wood and these were cut and painted with I do not know what of beast and bird and monstrous idol forms.  We stared.  The place was shadowy and very silent.  At last with an oath said Francisco de Porras, “Take the gold!” But the Adelantado cried, “No!” and going out of the hut that was almost a house we left the dead cacique and his crown and mantle and golden breastplate.  Two wooden figures at the door grinned upon us.  We saw now what seemed a light brown powder strewed around and across the threshold.  One of our men, stooping, took up a pinch then dropped it hastily.  “It is the same they threw against us!”

“Wizardry!  We’ll find harm from them yet!” That song crept in now at every turn.

We sailed from the Garden south by east along the endless coast that no strait broke.  At first fair weather ran with us.  But the Margarita was so lame!  And all our other ships wrenched and worm-pierced.  And the Admiral was growing old before our eyes.  Not his mind or his soul but his frame.

He bettered, left his bed and walked the deck.  And then we came to the coast we called the Golden Coast, and his hope spread great wings again, and if our mariners talked of magic it was for a time glistening white.

Gold, gold!  A deep bay, thronged at the mouth with islets so green and fair, they were marvel to us who were sated with islands great and small.  We entered under overhanging trees, and out at once to us shot twenty canoes.  The Indians within wore gold in amount and purity far beyond anything in ten years.  Oh, our ships could scarce contain their triumph!  The Admiral looked a dreamer who comes to the bliss center in his dream.  Gold was ever to him symbol and mystery.  He did not look upon it as a buyer of strife and envy, idleness and soft luxury; but as a buyer of crusades, ships and ships, discoveries and discoveries, and Christ to enter heathendom.

Gold!  Discs of great size, half-moons, crescent moons, pierced for a cotton string.  Small golden beasts and birds, poorly carved but golden.  They traded freely; we gathered gold.  And there was more and more, they said, at Veragua, wherever that might be, and south and east it seemed to be.

Veragua!  We would go there.  Again we hoisted sail and in our ships, now all unseaworthy, crept again in a bad wind along the coast of gold,—­Costa Rico.  At last we saw many smokes from the land.  That would be a large Indian village.  We beat toward it, found a river mouth and entered.  But Veragua must have heard of us from a swift land traveler.  When a boat from each ship would approach the land—­it was in the afternoon, the sun westering fast —­a sudden burst of a most melancholy and awful din came from the forest growing close to water side.