His purpose was to return and undertake the conquest of the region of the upper Magdalena and the rich Indian communities on the broad table-land on top of the eastern Cordillera; but, before he could set out, an expedition from Santa Marta, under the command of the gallant young Gonzalo Jiminez de Quesada—ranked by many as the greatest of the Conquistadores after Cortés and Pizarro—had forestalled him. Quesada too had heard the stories of El Dorado and had been directed to a lake called Guatavita, two miles high in the mountains, that was supposed to be in the country over which El Dorado ruled, and also the dwelling place of a powerful goddess to whom the people offered jewels and gold by throwing them in the water. “They had a legend,” says Hawthorne— “To the effect that the Goddess of the Lake had been the wife of a former chief who had thrown herself into the lake to escape a whipping, and, like the maidens of Greek mythology, had been made one of the immortals. Pilgrims came from afar to add their offerings of gold and emeralds to the divinity. At every installation of a chief there was an imposing ceremony. First marched a squad of naked men painted with red ocher, as mourners, then men adorned with gold and emeralds, with feather headdresses, then warriors in jaguar skins. These shouted and made an uproar on horns, pipes, and conch shells. Black-robed priests accompanied the procession, with white crosses on their breasts, and in the rear came the nobles, bearing the new chief on a barrow hung with gold disks. He was naked, his body rendered sticky with resinous gums and then smeared over with gold dust. Having reached the shore of the lake, he got on a barge and was rowed to the center, where he dived into the water and washed off his gold, while the assemblage on the shore shouted with joy and flung their offerings into the transparent abode of the Goddess.” This, it seems, had once been true, but, although the Indians of the lowlands may not have known it, the custom had ceased to exist long before the coming of the Spaniards. Many of the bravest were lured to their death in the vain quest, not only in the Colombian Andes but in the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon, and even south along the Paraguay and Paraná, before the discovery was made that the custom was a thing of the past.