The Mistery of Belicena Villca in those wild and unknown lands ; it also did not relieve the situation the small troop of veterans of Santa Marta under the command of Captain Rivera who joined them in the middle of the road : those men were lost in the jungle , unhappy to march in vain after a wealth that was nowhere to be found . After suffering the thousand hardships offered by tropical forests , with their poisonous snakes , spiders , insects , ferocious tigers , and its intricate vegetation that had to be swooped open , the invaders experienced the icy wind from the high peaks that surround the Dupar Valley . And after the break , again the hot jungle , the plagues , and the savage indians , who now harassed them incessantly . However , they continued undaunted to the south , crossed the Apure and Meta Rivers , apart from a thousand smaller torrents , and they penetrated in the territory of the present Colombia . But that country was outside the Welser concession and Federmann had no right to explore it .
And until then there was no indication that they were on the right way ; the few Indians they managed to capture gave imprecise directions about the stone cities : to the South , always to the South ; but to the South they found only miserable villages and indians of unparalleled savagery , cannibals and head hunters , aborigines who poisoned their arrows and spears and they followed them without rest , permanently ambushing them , attacking them by the rear guard when marching and in the camps when resting . After a year and a half of advancing in that direction , decimated , converted most of the men in living skeletons covered in rags , it was imposed at the discretion of Federmann the decision to return ; otherwise he could no longer prevent the mutiny of the survivors or his desertion : of the hundred men in his troop only fifty were alive , most of them in deplorable condition .
The Lords of Tharsis , for their part , stoically endured the campaign and only lost three Catalan soldiers ; they pretended to continue towards the South , but they couldn ' t find a way to persuade the German . Finally , before his irrevocable determination , they opted for a heroic solution , which Nikolaus could not deny either : they would stay there and continue their search alone . The plan was nothing short of suicidal , but since neither party was willing to give in , Nikolaus Federmann agreed to let them go secretly , simulating a loss that would avoid problems with the Welsers or the charge of desertion . This is how one day , the tired column separated from the Spanish vanguard of Tharsis and was lost forever , because not even the Germans of the House of Welser , nor the Spaniards of the Kingdom , ever saw them again .
Nikolaus Federmann continued his explorations , always disobeying Georg von Speyer ' s orders . In 1539 , he along with Jiménez de Quesada and Sebastián de Belalcazar , Governors of Santa Marta and Quito respectively , with whom he met in the middle of the jungle , founded the city of Santa Fe de Bogotá . He then undertook with the aforementioned captains a trip to Cartagena de Indias and from there he went to Spain with Quesada . Although a discoverer and explorer of lands , he did not get any wealth and returned practically ruined . However , when he brought to the Lords of Tharsis the news about the fate run by Lito and the Men of Stone , they rewarded him generously and employed him in the Villa de Turdes , where he ended his days .
And what had happened to the Lords of Tharsis in America ? To the parting with Nikolaus Federmann they were on the west side of the East Cordillera , about a thousand kilometers from the starting point and another three hundred from the city of Quito , at the height where the Napo River originates . It was a region of cold and desolate wasteland , where an icy gale blew , made the teeth gnash and chilled to the bone . They had come upon a steep path that seemed to be made by the hand of man , since at certain points they could be observed stacks of stones that served as walls of containment for alluvial landslides , and followed them with renewed hope : they did not even remotely imagine that they would still travel five thousand kilometers to reach their destination . All Nikolaus could leave them was ten horses and very few provisions : with four horses it was enough to carry everything , the scarce provisions , the cages with the chickens , and even the weapons , now useless for not having a gram of gunpowder . At the vanguard advanced Lito de Tharsis ,
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