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Now, northward coasting along Kolumbo's Western
shore, whence came the same wild forest-sounds, as from the
Eastern; and where we landed not, to seek among those
wrangling tribes;—after many, many days, we spied prow
after prow, before the wind all northward bound: sails
wide-spread, and paddles plying: scaring the fish from
before them.

Their inmates answered not our earnest hail.

But as they sped, with frantic glee, in one long chorus
thus they sang:—


We rovers bold,
To the land of Gold,
Over bowling billows are gliding:
Eager to toil,
For the golden spoil,
And every hardship biding.
See! See!
Before our prows' resistless dashes,
The gold-fish fly in golden flashes!
'Neath a sun of gold,
We rovers bold,
On the golden land are gaining;
And every night,
We steer aright,
By golden stars unwaning!
All fires burn a golden glare:
No locks so bright as golden hair!
All orange groves have golden gushings:
All mornings dawn with golden flushings!
In a shower of gold, say fables old,
A maiden was won by the god of gold!

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all Mardi over. With golden pills and potions is sickness
warded off?—the shrunken veins of age, dilated with new
wine of youth? Will gold the heart-ache cure? turn
toward us hearts estranged? will gold, on solid centers
empires fix? 'Tis toil world-wasted to toil in mines.
Were all the isles gold globes, set in a quicksilver sea, all
Mardi were then a desert. Gold is the only poverty; of
all glittering ills the direst. And that man might not
impoverish himself thereby, Oro hath hidden it, with all
other banes,—saltpeter and explosives, deep in mountain
bowels, and river-beds. But man still will mine for it;
and mining, dig his doom.—Yoomy, Yoomy!—she we seek,
lurks not in the Golden Hills!”

“Lo, a vision!” cried Yoomy, his hands wildly passed
across his eyes. “A vast and silent bay, belted by silent villages:—
gaunt dogs howling over grassy thresholds at stark
corpses of old age and infancy; gray hairs mingling with sweet
flaxen curls; fields, with turned furrows, choked with briers;
arbor-floors strown over with hatchet-helves, rotting in the
iron; a thousand paths, marked with foot-prints, all inland
leading, none villageward; and strown with traces, as of a
flying host. On: over forest—hill, and dale—and lo! the
golden region! After the glittering spoil, by strange rivermargins,
and beneath impending cliffs, thousands delve in
quicksands; and, sudden, sink in graves of their own making:
with gold dust mingling their own ashes. Still deeper, in
more solid ground, other thousands slave; and pile their
earth so high, they gasp for air, and die; their comrades
mounting on them, and delving still, and dying—grave pile
on grave! Here, one haggard hunter murders another in
his pit; and murdering, himself is murdered by a third.
Shrieks and groans! cries and curses! It seems a golden
Hell! With many camels, a sleek stranger comes—pauses
before the shining heaps, and shows his treasures: yams
and bread-fruit. `Give, give,' the famished hunters cry—
`a thousand shekels for a yam!—a prince's ransom for a

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p275-648

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