That was the end of my adventure in Central America. By the lakeshore in Granada, Nicaragua, I decided to turn for home. I wondered what Cortes would have said if, when he set out in the wake of Columbus, he had foreseen the beach outside Granada. He knew in his bones of the glory to come, would he have known about its eclipse? A Church without the True Cross, unable to protect its buildings from earthquake or idolatry; the gold and silver mines exhausted; the children of the Conquest reduced to beggary, placing their trust in the redundant theories of a Victorian economist; the empire overwhelmed by its own pagan and monstrous child. What a fool time has made of Cortes and his pretensions. He should have turned back to Cuba, to his dice and his saints and his women, and left the Indians with the Gods they honour, against all the odds, to this day.