Explore "Westward Ho!" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me -- Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods! " TENNYSON'S Ulysses.
Nearly three years are past and gone since that little band had knelt at evensong beneath the giant tree of Guayra -- years of seeming blank, through which they are to be tracked only by scattered notes and mis-spelt names. Through untrodden hills and forests, over a space of some eight hundred miles in length by four hundred in breadth, they had been seeking for the Golden City, and they had sought in vain. They had sought it along the wooded banks of the Orinoco, and beyond the roaring foam-world of Maypures, and on the upper waters of the mighty Amazon. They had gone up the streams even into Peru itself, and had trodden the cinchona groves of Loxa, ignorant, as all the world was then, of their healing virtues. They had seen the virgin snows of Chimborazo towering white above the thundercloud, and the giant cone of Cotopaxi blackening in its sullen wrath, before the fiery streams rolled down its sides.