Yermah the Dorado: The Story of a Lost Race
9781465672551
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Yermah, the Dorado, was refreshed and invigorated by his early morning ride. It had been a voluntary gallop, and it would have been hard to say which found the keenest enjoyment in it; he, his horse Cibolo, or Oghi the ocelot, which ran beside them in long, slow leaps, covering much ground yet always alighting noiselessly and as softly as a cat. It was a beautiful morning, one that would correspond to the first of June now—but this was in the long ago, when days and months were reckoned differently. The tall grass and wild oats left ample proof of close proximity along the roadside by the fragments secreted in the clothing of Yermah and in the trappings of Cibolo. Oghi, too, could have been convicted on the evidence his formidable toes presented. Added to this was the indescribable scent of dew, of the first hours of day and the springtime of nature. It was the first time since his arrival from Atlantis that Yermah had ventured alone outside the city limits. When once the temples, and marketplaces of Tlamco were left behind him, he had given Cibolo the rein and abandoned himself to the exhilaration of going like the wind. Tlamco, the Llama city, the name of which was unknown to the men who sought the mythical Kingdom of Quivera—that will-o’-the wisp land—supposed to be the center of the Amazon inhabited island of California of the very remote past. Tlamco vanished so completely that there were no traces perceptible to the men who founded Yerba Buena on the same peninsula ages after. Its existence would be laughed at by present day inhabitants of San Francisco were it not true that the hills in and around Golden Gate Park are living witnesses of great mathematical skill. The first denizens built some of these hills and shaped others to give the diameters and distances of all the planets. Who of to-day will believe that Las Papas, or Twin Peaks, show the eccentricities of the earth’s orbit to one fifty-millionths of its full size? At present early morning milk-trains, and trucks loaded with vegetables from the outlying gardens intercept and mingle with the heavy wagons laden with meat from South City. In short, the modern city’s food supply comes from the same direction in which Yermah rode. Conditions and people have changed since then, and so have many of the features of the locality itself. South of what is known as the Potrero was a bay. Now it is a swamp, and the north and south points there are the remains of forts, although they appear to be nothing more than hillocks blown into shape by merest chance. To the west is a hill on which dwelt Hanabusa, the captain of the three-decked war-galleys, or balsas. Nearby was the signal tower which could be seen from every eminence in the city. It guarded the western side of the sanded causeway leading from the marketplace in the center of Tlamco to the water’s edge. Hanabusa’s house afforded protection to the north side.
