_Page_ INTRODUCTION xi _Chapter_ I. IN WHICH COMET GOES LAME 1 Two dreams have persistently haunted the imagination of man since dreams began. You find them in all mythologies, and, perhaps most dramatically, in the Arabian Nights: the dream of the Water of Immortality, and the dream of the Golden City. Within recent times--that is, during the sixteenth century--both were lifted out of the region of fairy lore, and men as far from "dreamers," in the ordinary sense, as the "conquistador" Ponce de Leon and Sir Walter Raleigh raised them into the sphere of something like Elizabethan practical politics. Whether or not Ponce de Leon did actually discover t…
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