He walked endlessly in the great emptiness of the North and for years he searched for the cities of gold which he knew did not exist.
But in this land he was revered. The people of the pueblos and mesas loved to look at him.
He had many women and sometimes he recognized a child as his. He wore feathers and great blue stones and he ate from the fat of the land.
He came from Granada. When the Christians swept through he remained, a Moor and a black man. He came to the Americas as a horse handler, but his horses had been taken years before.
It was the West that drew him. He heard of a great wall of snow far to the setting sun.
``The gold is there, beyond the far mountains,'' he was told.
He started on his way across the high plains. He forded rivers and found his way stopped by terrible deep gorges.
His body was breaking down when he reached the foothills of the great shining mountains of the west. Every day now for him was a trial. He had lost all feeling in his right leg and dragged it uselessly behind him. He kept it wrapped in dry grasses and skins because he could not feel when it was cut or injured and twice infections had raged through him and he smelled the breath of death on him.
He saw no people though twice he found the poles of summer lodges stacked against trees, and camp rocks scattered.
He spent a winter huddled under a rock overhang he had stuffed with mosses and pine boughs and sealed with snow and rocks. He mixed what came from his body with pine needles and ate it and he ate moss and gnawed dry and ancient bones and when he found a grub or insect it was a great day indeed.
When the late spring came he found himself neighbor to a grizzly bear. Bleary and stumbling and famished she turned on him and swiped him down. He pulled his knife and by blind luck slashed an artery in her neck. She fell and died but she took a long time dying as her cub kept troubling her. The cub stumbled after him a day or two then died. He was full of bear meat. The mother bear's meat was grainy with parasites but the cub's was cleaner.
The country was sweeter now. Harsh summits behind him. Surely he had crossed to the West. He stopped at a creek to drink and splash water on his face. As his hands slipped down his face he saw through crystal drops a nugget of gold on the white sand of the stream bed.
He scooped it up and held it in his two hands there in the year 1540 lost in the High Sierras.