steep, narrow streets, numerous convents,
and famous university, had been well-nigh ruined by the French, who had
pulled down half the convents and nearly all the colleges, and used the
stones for the building of forts, which, a few weeks previously,
Wellington had bombarded with red-hot shot.

The hospitals being crowded with sick and wounded, I was billeted in the
house of a certain Senor Don Alberto Zamorra, which (probably owing to the
fact of its having been the quarters of a French colonel) had not taken
much harm, either during the French occupation of the town or the
subsequent siege of the forts.

Don Alberto gave me a hearty, albeit a dignified welcome, and being a
Spanish gentleman of the old school, he naturally placed his house, and
all that it contained, at my disposal. I did not, of course, take this
assurance literally, and had I not been on the right side, I should
doubtless have met with a very different reception. All the same, he made
a very agreeable host, and before I had been his guest many days we became
fast friends.

Don Zamorra was old, nearly as old as I am now; and as I speedily
discovered, he had passed the greater part of his life in Spanish America,
where he had held high office under the crown. He could hardly talk about
anything else, in fact, and once he began to discourse about his former
greatness and the marvels of the Indies (as South and Central America were
then sometimes called) he never knew when to stop. He had crossed the
Andes and seen the Amazon, sailed down the Orinoco and visited the mines
of Potosi and Guanajuata, beheld the fiery summit of Cotopaxi, and peeped
down the smoky crater of Acatenango. He told of fights with Indians and
wild animals, of being lost in the forest, and of perilous expeditions in
search of gold and precious stones. When Zamorra spoke of gold his whole
attitude changed, the fires of his youth blazed up afresh, his face glowed
with excitement, and his eyes sparkled with greed. At these times I saw in
him a true type of the old Spanish Conquestadores, who would baptize a
cacique to save him from hell one day, and kill him and loot his treasure
the next.

Don Alberto had, moreover, a firm belief in the existence of the fabled El
Dorado, and of the city of Manoa, with its resplendent house of the sun,
its hoards of silver and gold, and its gilded king. Thousands of
adventurers had gone forth in search of these wonders, and thousands had
perished