The junction of three bodies of troops on the table-land of New Granada spread through all that part of America occupied by the Spaniards the news of an immensely rich and populous country which remained to be conquered. Sebastian de Belalcazar marched from Quito by way of Popayan (1536) to Bogota; Nicholas Federmann, coming from Venezuela, arrived from the east by the plains of Meta. These two captains found, already settled on the table-land of Cundirumarca, the famous Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez de Queseda, one of whose descendants I saw near Zipaquira, with bare feet, attending cattle. The fortuitous meeting of the three conquistadores, one of the most extraordinary and dramatic events of the history of the conquest, took place in 1538. Belalcazar's narratives inflamed the imagination of warriors eager for adventurous enterprises; and the notions communicated to Luis Daza by the Indian of Tacunga were compared with the confused ideas which Ordaz had collected on the Meta respecting the treasures of a great king with one eye (Indio tuerto), and a people clothed, who rode upon llamas. An old soldier, Pedro de Limpias, who had accompanied Federmann to the table-land of Bogota, carried the first news of El Dorado to Coro, where the remembrance of the expedition of Speier (1535 to 1537) to the Rio Papamene was still fresh. It was from this same town of Coro that Felipe von Huten (Urre, Utre) undertook his celebrated voyage to the province of the Omaguas, while Pizarro, Orellana, and Hernan Perez de Quesada, brother of the Adelantado, sought for the gold country at the Rio Napo, along the river of the Amazons, and on the eastern chain of the Andes of New Grenada. The natives, in order to get rid of their troublesome guests, continually described Dorado as easy to be reached, and situate at no considerable distance. It was like a phantom that seemed to flee before the Spaniards, and to call on them unceasingly. It is in the nature of man, wandering on the earth, to figure to himself happiness beyond the region which he knows. El Dorado, similar to Atlas and the islands of the Hesperides, disappeared by degrees from the domain of geography, and entered that of mythological fictions.