Time, patience, alertness and caution are the trackers which search
out the things most hidden and most fenced in.

JUAN DE CASTELLANOS

THE triumphs of Hernan Cortes and Francisco
Pizarro have thrown into unmerited shadow the
achievements of other Conquistadores, who with equal
endurance, sagacity and courage overcame difficulties
not less although different in kind. For English readers
Mr. Cunninghame Graham has repaired this injustice
in his book The Conquest of New Granada, being the Life
of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada ( London, 1922), a book
which tells the story with intimate reality, being written
with knowledge of the ground traversed by the con-
querors and of the nature of their work.

After the conquest of Mexico and of Peru there
still remained another opulent region strangely remote,
isolated and self-contained like the fabulous empires of
legend or fiction. When Cortes reached the coast of
Yucatan, he was at once in touch with a civilisation
which extended from Ocean to Ocean: when Pizarro
reached Tumbez he was within the orbit of the vast
Inca empire which stretched through thirty-five degrees
of latitude. But the Chibcha people had developed an
organised civic life in a limited highland region,
measuring about forty-five leagues in length from north

-310-