The Fiery Angel Read Free

troops. With my own eyes I saw the infuriated soldiers loot the churches of Rome, commit violations in nunneries, ride wearing mitres through the streets on Papal mules, throw the Holy Sacrament and the Relics of the Saints into the Tiber, set up a conclave and declare Martin Luther pope. After that I spent about a year in the various cities of Italy, acquainting myself more closely with the life of the country, a land truly enlightened and still remaining a shining example to the other nations of the world. This enabled me to become familiar with the entrancing creations of the Italian painters, whose works are so superior to those of ours, except of course to those of the inimitable Albrecht Dürer—amongst them, moreover, the creations of most recent times, those of the ever lamented Raphael d’Urbino, his worthy competitor Sebastiano del Piombo, the young but all-embracing genius Benvenuto Cellini, whom we also encountered as an enemy in the field, and Michael-Angelo Buonarotti, who despises somewhat the beauty of form, but is yet powerful and original.
    In the spring of the following year, the lieutenant of the Spanish detachment, Don Miguel de Gamez, approached me to his person as physician, because I had gained a certain familiarity with the Spanish language. Together with Don Miguel I had to travel to Spain, whither he was despatched with secret letters to our Emperor, and this journey resolved my fate. Having found the court at the City of Toledo, we found there also the greatest of our contemporaries, a hero equal to the Hannibals, Scipios and other great men of antiquity—Hernando Cortes, the Marquis del Valje-Oaxaca. The reception arranged for that proud conqueror of Empires, as well as the narratives of those who had returned from the country so entrancingly described by Amerigo Vespucci, persuaded me to seek my fortune in that blessed haven for all the failures of this earth. I joined a friendly expedition, organised by German settlers in Seville, and set sail with light heart across the Ocean.
    In the West Indies I entered at first the service of the Royal Audiencia; but soon, having seen proof of how unfaithfully and unskilfully it conducts its affairs, and of how unjustly it rewards abilities and services, I chose rather to execute commissions for those German houses that have factories in the New World, for preference for the Welzers who own copper mines in San Domingo, but also for the Fuggers, the Ellingers, the Krombergs and the Tetzels. Four times I made forays to the West, to the South and to the North, searching for new veins of ore, for fields of gems—amethysts and emeralds, and for a forest of precious timbers: twice under the command of others, and twice personally commanding the expeditions. In this way I marched through all the lands from Chicora to the port of Tumbes, spending long months among the dark-skinned heathen, beholding in the log-palaces of the natives riches so vast that before them the treasures of our Europe are as nothing, and several times escaping the destruction that hung over me as if almost by a miracle. In my love for an Indian woman, who concealed beneath her dark skin a heart that could feel both attachment and passion, it was my lot to experience powerful agonies of soul, but it would be out of place to relate of them here at greater length. I may say in short—that, just as those soft twilight days spent at the books with dear Friedrich educated my thoughts, so these terrible years of wandering tempered my will in the flame of trial, and endowed me with that most priceless attribute of man—faith in myself.
    It is certainly quite erroneous for people in our country to imagine that across the Ocean gold is to be gathered from the earth merely by stooping down, but, none the less, after spending five years in America and the West Indies, I contrived, by unremitting industry and toil and not without the help of luck, to put by an adequate sum in savings. And it was