In May 1595, a hundred Englishmen - "gentlemen, soldiers, rowers, boat-keepers, boys, and of all sorts" - rowed up a river in South America in search of the lost golden city of El Dorado. They were led by Sir Walter Ralegh, forty years old, ready to hazard his fading reputation on this doomed gamble. Four hundred years later Charles Nicholl follows their trail into the strange terrain of this enduring international obsession. The journey begins with Ralegh's curious "charte" in the British Museum and leads through the labyrinthine delta of the Orinoco River and up into the rugged Guiana highlands of southern Venezuela, the setting of Conan Doyle's The Lost World. A night with a Warao tobacco shaman, an encounter with the jungle-hermit Laime, bush pilot Jimmy Angel's stories of earlier days, life in the shantytowns of the region's gold diggers - these color and deepen the book's intense recollection of that original Elizabethan expedition. In this vivid reconstruction, Charles Nicholl blends historical scholarship with idiosyncratic reportage in a unique and fascinating mix.