Quesada justified the trust which his former superior had, perhaps without particular forethought, placed in him. He never spared his own person, and he did all he could for his men. If a rapid stream was to be bridged he was the first to lay the axe to the trees of which the bridge was to be built. He carried the sick and feeble in his own arms through swamps and across fords. He thus, by devotion combined with strictness in discipline, controlled his men so that the exhausted company followed him without demurrer to Tamalameque, where they expected to find the boats. The Rio Magdalena was in flood, and its shores were overflowed for miles. Instead of the expected flotilla loaded with provisions, Quesada found only two leaky brigantines, and a hundred and eighty famishing men. The disappointment was bitter; he felt as if he were abandoned. But the round cakes of salt that came from the mountains in the south had reached this region, and Quesada determined to follow the paths over which they had been brought. A retreat by land would, at any rate, involve sure destruction. Again his weary men followed him, and he reached Latora, one hundred and fifty leagues from the mouth of the Magdalena. Eight months had passed since he had left the coast, and his march had been disastrous, but the worst seemed to be yet awaiting him at this spot. A wooded, uninhabited waste of waters encompassed the force, and the swollen river cut off alike all advance and all retreat. Attempts to move the brigantines up the stream were vain; they could not be taken more than twenty-five leagues. Despair then overcame discipline. The men, dejected and weeping, besought their leader to send them back in the brigantines by detachments to the coast, and to give up an enterprise which had so far brought them, instead of gold, only misery, hunger, and death. The moment was imminent in which every bond of respect for their leader seemed about to be broken, when the captains Cardoso and Alburazin returned to the camp after several days of absence and reported that they had discovered a river flowing down from the mountains, and ascending it had come to a spot where traces of men could be seen. On the strength of this story Quesada was able to silence his men’s complaints and gain time to make further research in the direction pointed out by his captains. Captain San Martin found, twenty-five miles farther up this mountain stream, a trodden path leading up into the mountains, and along it a number of huts which contained salt. Quesada himself started off with his best men and found the path, but fell ill and was obliged to halt. Antonio de Lebrixa went on to the mountains with twenty-five men, and came back with the welcome intelligence that he had found there a fertile plain inhabited by men who lived in villages and went about clothed in cotton. Quesada hastened back to his camp at Latora, put the sick and weak upon the brigantines, and sent them back to Cartagena. In the beginning of the year 1537 Quesada, at the head of one hundred and sixty-six of his most effective men, stepped upon the plateau of Cundinamarca, the former home of the _dorado_. He had lost more than five hundred men by hunger, illness, and exposure.