reat shower of
rain; and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke
that had risen over some great town. For mine own part, I was
well persuaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill
footman, but the rest were all so desirous to go near the said
strange thunder of waters, that they drew me on by little and
little, till we came into the next valley, where we might better
discern the same. I never saw a more beautiful country, nor more
lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over the
valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plains
adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, the
ground of hard sand easy to march on either for horse or foot,
the deer crossing in every path, the birds towards the evening
singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and
herons of white, crimson, and carnation perching on the river's
side, the air fresh with a gentle easterly wind, and every stone
that we stooped to take up promised either gold or silver by his
complexion.

The last touch spoils an exquisite picture. It is at once dispiriting to
find so intrepid a geographer and so acute a merchant befooled by the
madness of gold, and pathetic to know that his hopes in this direction
were absolutely unfounded. The white quartz of Guiana, the 'hard white
spar' which Raleigh describes, confessedly contains gold, although, as
far as is at present known, in quantities so small as not to reward
working. Humboldt says that his examination of Guiana gold led him to
believe that, 'like tin, it is sometimes disseminated in an almost
imperceptible manner in the mass of granite rocks itself, without our
being able to admit that there is a ramification and an interlacing of
small veins.' It is plain that Raleigh got hold of unusually rich
specimens of the sparse auriferous quartz. He was accused on his return
of having brought his specimens from Africa, but no one suggested that
they did not contain gold. No doubt much of the sparkling dust he saw in
the rocks was simply iron pyrites, or some other of the minerals which
to this day are known to the wise in California as 'fool's gold.' His
expedition had come to America unprovided with tools of any kind, and
Raleigh confesses that such specimens of ore as they did not buy from
the Indians, they had to tear out with their daggers or with their
fingers.

It has been customa