"Surely, not 'Adios,' but--until the next time, Sajipona," he replied, as he bowed himself from the sala. Raoul's belief in the legend involved in Sajipona's name marked a radical change which he had undergone since he arrived in Bogota. To his keen, logical mind the proposal to enlist in a quest for the long lost El Dorado seemed, at first, far too quixotic to be taken seriously. But he humored the idea, originating in David's fondness for studies touching the borderlands of romance, in the hope that he would divert a purely fanciful project into more profitable channels. Later on, however, he was himself caught by the practical possibilities lurking in the old Chibcha legend. Hence, it followed that while David was enjoying the picturesque life of the little mountain capital, Raoul was delving in musty records, running down old traditions, and studying the topography of the Bogota tableland with a degree of patience as to details that the subject had rarely received. For days at a time he burrowed in the crumbling archives of the Museo Nacional, an unpretentious little edifice, not far from the palace of San Carlos, in which were stored, pell-mell, practically every evidence that remained of Colombia's prehistoric civilization. Here, with only the grey, shrivelled mummies of two ancient kings of the Chibchas to watch him, he had reconstructed, as best he could, the past of this vanished race of people, had convinced himself of their wealth, scarcely any of which had fallen into the hands of the Spanish, and had laid his plans for discovering a treasure which had balked every explorer before him. Combined with these studies in the National Museum and in the vicinity of Lake Guatavita, Raoul had busied himself with the peons of the neighborhood. From these primitive people he learned enough to corroborate the main features in the Chibcha tradition as handed down by Castellanos, Pedro Simon, Piedrahita, and other chroniclers of the Spanish Conquest. In addition, he unearthed the curious legend that the Sacred Lake would never yield up its treasure except to one in whose veins flowed the blood of the Chibcha kings. This bit of prophetic romance had come, it was said, from father to son through the four centuries following the martyrdom of the last of the zipas. He was told, also--and it added to the fantastic character of the prophecy--that a secret, known only to the zipas and their direct descendants, attached to Lake Guatavita, and that by means of this secret the treasure hidden beneath its waters would be discovered.