This naïve incuriousness in the presence of something so significant of course has not been shared by a different order of observers. Buache[136] found here as he thought the genuine and only Seven Cities of the legend. Humboldt[137] opposed this view with a reminder of the Seven Cities of Cibola. But it is fair to remember that New Mexico was quite impossible for the Portuguese of 711 or thereabout, whereas St. Michaels Island offered an accessible and tempting place of refuge. The name could not have been derived from settlement in the former; but it might really be derived from settlement in the latter. Granting that the fugitives might not be able to maintain themselves there in safety for many years after the Arabs had begun their tentative and always uneasy incursions into the western Sea of Darkness, it still may be that the town or towns of this hidden island valley might endure long enough and seem imposing enough and be visited often enough by Christians from the mainland to supply the nucleus of the most picturesque and adventurous of legends; and this tale might follow any later migration into the unknown, or survive and find new abiding places for the name and fancy long after the original colony--archbishop and bishops and congregations, military commanders, and mailed soldiery--had all been somehow destroyed or had melted apart and drifted away. All that remains certain is the continued presence of the name of the Seven Cities on that spot. Some ruins are said to have marked it formerly, but very little is visible now, if we may trust the following description by an intelligent visitor in the middle of the last century: