El Dorado

El Dorado(the land of gold), a supposed region of America in which gold and jewels were as common as stones and pebbles. It was to the adventurers and explorers of the infancy of colonisation what the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life was to the alchemists of the same period. "Aim at a vesture of gold and you may get a sleeve," says the old proverb, and searches after El Dorado resulted in the acquisition of some of our most valuable colonies. It was Orellana, the companion of Pizarro, that first set the stone rolling in this direction, and it is not impossible that he had some groundwork for his ideas in rumours of that Central American civilisation whose remains form one of the puzzles of the present day.