wealth; yet the tremendous event in which he had shared wholly fascinated him, and he wrote a book which has been a primary source for every student of the Conquest of Mexico since then and which is also one of the most moving adventure stories ever written in America.

It is available now to the general reader in two editions: a reprint of the A. P. Maudslay translation, with an introduction by Professor Irving A. Leonard, presented under the title, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico , and a new translation by Albert Idell titled The Bernal Díaz Chronicles . The Maudslay translation is rendered in highly dignified language and is aimed, more or less, at the scholar; the Idell version is in contemporary vernacular and seems to have been designed for the general reader. Take your choice; either one is good, and either will give you a great story.

For Díaz had something to talk about. Díaz was a professional soldier, tough enough, extremely disillusioned—he had come to see that in this rape of a fabulous empire it was somehow the big shots who came out with a pocketful of gold, while the common soldier had his scars and his memories for his pains—but he is forever interrupting himself with the remark that the marvels he tells about were, after all, real, and that his hitch in the army transported him from ordinary life into something that existed only in romance.

The Bernal Díaz Chronicles , translated and edited by Albert Idell. Doubleday & Co. 414 pp. $5.

This, he keeps saying, I saw myself: this is the way it actually was, these fantastic tales of blood and gold and people who lived by a different book were all true. … “I say again that I stood looking at it and thought that never in the world would there be discovered other lands such as these, for in that time there was no Peru, nor any thought of it. … Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we—we did not even number four hundred soldiers. … We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues [temples] and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.”

This was the golden dawn, and Díaz marched through the exact middle

of it, with its terrible light glinting from the blade of his sword; this was the thing that romancers had dreamed of, sharpened and made deadly, great beauty and unspeakable cruelty going hand in hand, wealth beyond dreams lying ready to be taken; and every man who reached out to take it ran the risk that he would be thrown down on a stone altar with the throbbing heart torn out of his breast by a bloodstained hand—and an old man, tired and helpless and stricken with poverty, could look back on it and put it down on paper so that people who came later could understand that all of the myths were true. At the very beginning of the American story, before anyone had imagined places like Pittsburgh or Madison Avenue or the Harvard Yard or the Corn Belt, here was the sign that the wildest of dreams could fall short of reality. The dawn came up like thunder, and the memory of it was enough to stir an old soldier and turn him into a poet.

And this was the genuine sounding of the theme song—the snatch of impossible music that would run under and over everything men would ever do in this new world, the strange blend of disillusioned realism and the confirmation of all the gaudy notions of unsophisticated youth. At the very start, men found that America could go beyond their expectations. It would be full of cruelty and injustice and rapacity, but it would also embody the final laying on of hands on the unattainable, and it would offer cloud-capped towers which, when taken, would provide nothing more than a new place from which to go on to greater heights. Here, at last, the imagination of men was set forever free. The natural corollary, of course, is the warning: Beware what dreams you dream because you are living in a land where they are apt to come true.