To rid himself of these morbid questionings, he would give his remoter memory the reins to-day, at whatever cost; it was pleasanter to remember bygone unpleasantness than to live with the ills which threatened his present life. He recollected how some one had once asked Carlyle, "Why does the Past always seem so much happier than the Present?" And Carlyle's stern reply, "Because the fear has gone out of it." How odd it seemed to him that he should be recalling Carlyle up there in Keewatin! Yet, because that answer was true, he took up the thread of his London life again, that so, with the drug of memory, he might lay to rest his immediate misfortunes. He was a little boy again in the old red house on Clapton Common. One by one he entered its homely rooms with their ancient furniture, quaint wall-paper, and general look of substantial comfort. Once more he leant out of the bow-window at the back and gazed beyond the hill, upon which the house was built, up which gardens climbed, divided by creeper-covered walls of crumbling brick, down to where at its foot the river ran through flats and marshes. Far away, a little to the right, old Woodford raised its head; to the left Chingford, as yet unmodernized, showed up; and straight ahead, at a distance of seven miles, the steeple of High Beech, in the kindly habitable forest of Epping, was in sight. This was the house in which he had first dreamed the dream by the glamour of which he had been led astray. His father had dreamed the same dream, and his grandfather before him; it seemed to be a part of the walls and masonry, so interwoven was it with his memories of that house. It had been the first faery-story which he had ever listened to, and had been told to him for the most part in that back room with the bow-window, as he had sat on his grand-father's knee on winters' nights.
The first time that he had heard it he could not have been more than five, and his father was absent, so his grandfather said, pursuing the dream on the other side of the world. This was the story as he remembered it. "In the land of Guiana there is a golden city named Manoa, but El Dorado in the Spanish language, which stands on the shores of a vast inland lake whose waters are salt, which is called Parima, and which is two hundred leagues in length. Juan Martinez was the first white man to visit it, and he did so through no fault of his own! When he was with the Spanish army at the port of Morequito, the store of powder, of which he had charge, caught fire and was destroyed. His commander, Diego Ordas, was so enraged that he sentenced him to death; but being appealed to by the soldiery with whom Martinez was a favourite, he commuted his punishment to this--that he should be set in a canoe alone, without any victual, only with his arms, and so turned loose on the great river. By the grace of God he floated down stream and was captured by certain Indians, who, never having seen a European before or anyone of that colour, carried him into a land to be wondered at, and so from town to town, until he came to the golden city of Manoa of which Inca was emperor. Now the emperor, when he beheld him, knew him to be a Christian, for not long since his brethren had been vanquished by the Spaniards in Peru; therefore he had him lodged in his palace and ordered that he should be respectfully entertained. There Martinez lived for seven months, and all that while was not allowed to wander beyond the city's walls lest he should discover the country's secrets, for he had been brought thither blindfold and had been fifteen days in the passage. When, years later, he came to die, he confessed to a priest that he had entered Manoa at high noon and that then his captors had uncovered his eyes, and that he had travelled all that day till nightfall through its streets and all the next, from the rising to the setting of the sun, of so great extent was it, until he arrived at the palace. It was Martinez who had given to Manoa its name of El Dorado, because its roadways were paved with gold, and there was so great an abundance of that metal there that, before the emperor would carouse with his captains, all those who were to pledge him were stripped naked, and their bodies anointed with white balsam, over which through hollow canes was blown by slaves the dust of fine gold, so that when his guests sat down to drink with him, they glistened yellow in the sun like gilded statues.