44 
OTHER EARLY EXPEDITIONS. 
h.Tcl no doubt that these ■wandering Spaniards were men 
unfortunately shiiiwrecked in the expedition of Ordaz. He 
crossed the savannahs of San Juan de los Llanos, which 
were said to abound in gold; and made a long stay at 
an Indian village called Fueblo de Nucstra Senora, and 
afterwards La Pragua, south-east of the Paramo de la 
Suiua Paz. I have been on the western back of this 
group of mountains, at Fusagasuga, and there heard that 
the plains by which they are skirted toward the east, still 
enjoy some celebrity for wealth among the natives. Speier 
tbimd in the populous viUago of La Fragua a Casa del 
Sol (temple of the sun), and a convent of virgins similar 
to those of Peru and Hew Granada. Were these the con- 
sequence of a migration of religious rites towards the east ? 
or must we admit that the plains of San Juan were their 
first cradle F Tradition, indeed, records that Bochica, the 
legislator of New Granada and high-priest of Iraca, had 
gone up from the plains of the east to the table-land of 
Bogota. But Bochica being at once the offspring and the 
symbol of the sun, his history may contain allegories that 
are merely astrological. Speier, pursuing his way toward 
the south, and crossing the two branches of the Guaviare, 
which are the Ai-iare and the Guayavero (Guayaro or Cani- 
camare), arrived on the banks of the great Bio Papamene 
or Caqueta. The resistance he met with during a whole 
year in the province do los Cheques, put an end, in 1537, to 
this inemm’able expedition. Nicolas Federmann and Gero- 
nimo de Oi’tal (1536), who went from ifaearapana and the 
mouth of the Eio Never!, Mowed (1535) the traces of 
Jorge de Espira. The former sought for gold hi the Eio 
Grande de la Magdalena ; the latter endeavoured to discover 
a temple of the sun (Casa del Sol) on the banks of the 
Meta. Ignorant of the idiom of the natives, they seemed 
to see everywhere, at the foot of the Cordilleras, the reflexion 
of the greatness of the temples of Iraca (Sogamozo), which 
was then the centre of the civilization of Cundinamarca. 
I have now examined, in a geographical point of view, the 
expeditions on the Oiinoco, and in a western and southern 
direction on the eastern bade of the Andes, before the tradi- 
tion of El Dorado was spread among the conquistadores. 
This tradition, as wo have noticed above, had its origin in 
