El Dorado and Other Pursuits by Evan S Connell

Author:Evan S Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473520837
Publisher: Random House

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El Dorado

IF YOU GO to Bogotá and visit the Banco de la República you will see, in the bank’s Museo del Oro, nearly 10,000 pre-Columbian gold artifacts: labrets, nose rings, brooches, masks, spoons, pincers, receptacles, representations of birds, snakes, crocodiles, people, animals. You walk down a corridor lined on both sides with display cases, each case packed with these opulent creations. You turn right, walk down another corridor past more of the same. Then more. And more. Finally, instead of going out, you are led into a dark room. After you have been there awhile the lights begin rising so gradually that you expect to hear violins, and you find yourself absolutely surrounded by gold. If all of Tut’s gold were added to this accumulation, together with everything Schliemann plucked from Mycenae and Hissarlik, you could scarcely tell the difference.

Quite a lot of it is Muisca, a name that may not mean anything unless you happen to be an anthropologist, or a collector, or at least a Colombian. The Muisca Indians were one of the Chibcha tribes living in the highlands around Bogotá. They were sedentary farmers with no great authority or influence; but for a number of years, nobody knows just how long, until they were deprived of their independence by some Chibcha cousins, they observed a ritual unlike any other in the world.

Guatavitá was their principal village. High above it at an altitude of about two miles is a small circular lake which was formed several thousand years ago when a meteorite plunged into the earth. People were living in the Andean cordilleras at that time and a memory of the phenomenon must have survived, because Chibcha mythology relates how a golden god dropped from the sky to make his home at the bottom of Lake Guatavitá.

Whenever a new Muisca chieftain was elected–or perhaps each year on a certain day–he gave thanks to this radiant underwater deity. After first being anointed with sticky balsam gum he was sprayed with gold dust through cane tubes until he became a glittering living statue. Then he walked from the temple to the lake shore, accompanied by priests wearing black cotton robes and by the Muisca men whose bodies were painted red. At the shore he stepped aboard a raft and was paddled to the center of the lake where–possibly at dawn, just as sunlight illuminated the water–he dove in and washed away the gold. Then the people who had followed him, who now stood all around the perimeter of the lake, hurled emeralds and golden trinkets into the water.

The last performance of this ceremony seems to have taken place about 1480, but when the Europeans arrived they heard stories of a gilded man; and after they had told the stories to each other often enough the Muisca chief became an omnipotent king who ruled a golden empire. Not only did the king himself go about his daily affairs dressed in a golden crust, so did the nobles of his

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