Stephens had written his classic "incidents of travel" about these regions a hundred years before, and Catherwood, who had studied Piranesi in London and the great ruins of Egypt and Greece, had drawn the splendid illustrations that accompanied the text.
Catherwood, an architect in New York, had been forgotten, like Stephens, and Victor reconstructed their lives as one reconstructs, for a museum, a dinosaur from two or three petrified bones.
He had unearthed Stephens's letters in a New Jersey farmhouse and he discovered Stephens's unmarked grave in an old cemetery on the east side of New York, where the great traveller had been hastily buried during a cholera epidemic.
Victor had been stirred by my account of him in Makers And Finders, for Stephens was one of the lost writers whom Melville had seen in his childhood and whom I was bent on resurrecting.

Victor had led an adventurous life.
His metier was the American tropics, and he had lived all over Latin America and among the primitive tribes on the Amazon river.
Well he knew the sleepless nights, the howling sore-ridden dogs and the biting insects in the villages of the Kofanes and Huitotoes.
He had not yet undertaken the great exploit of his later years, the rediscovery of the ancient Inca highway, the route of Pizarro in Peru, but he had climbed to the original El Dorado, the Andean lake of Guatemala, and he had scaled the southern Sierra Nevada with its Tibetan-like people and looked into the emerald mines of Muzo.
As a naturalist living for two years at the headwaters of the Amazon, he had collected specimens for Mexican museums, and he had taken to the London zoo a live quetzal, the sacred bird of the old Mayans.
In fact, he had raised quetzal birds in his camp in the forest of Ecuador.
Moreover, he had spent six months on the Galapagos islands, among the great turtles that Captain Cook had found there, and now and then he would disappear into some small island of the West Indies.
Victor's book on John Lloyd Stephens was largely written in my study in the house at Weston.

I had had my name taken out of the telephone book, and this was partly because of a convict who had been discharged from Sing Sing and who called me night after night.
He said he was a friend of Heywood Broun who had run a free employment bureau for several months during the depression, but the generous Broun to whom I wrote did not know his name and I somehow conceived the morbid notion that the man in question was prowling round the house.
But one day came the voice of a man I had known when he was a boy, and I later remembered that this boy, thirty years before, had struck me as coming to no good.
There had been something sinister about him that warned me against him, -- I had never felt that way about any other boy, -- but when he uttered his name on the telephone I had forgotten this and I was glad to do what he asked of me.
He was a captain, he said, in the army, and on the train to New York his purse and all his money had been stolen, and would I lend him twenty-five dollars to be given him at the General Delivery window?
Never hearing from him again, I remembered the little boy of whom I had had such doubts when he was ten years old.
We lived for a while in a movie melodrama with a German cook and her son who turned out to be Nazis.
Finally we got them out of the house, after the boy had run away four times looking for other Nazis, threatening to murder village schoolchildren and bragging that he was to be the next Fuhrer.
Then he began to have epileptic fits.
We found that a charitable society in New York had a long case-history of the two;
and they agreed to see that the tragic pair would not put poison in anybody else's soup.

To the Weston house came once William Allen Neilson, the president of Smith College who had been one of my old professors and who still called me "Boy" when I was sixty.
It reminded me of my other professor, Edward Kennard Rand, of whom I had been so fond when I was at Harvard, the great mediaevalist and classical scholar who had asked me to call him "Ken", saying, "Age counts for nothing among those who have learned to know life sub specie aeternitatis".
I had always thought of that lovable man as many years older than myself, although he was perhaps only twenty years older, and he confirmed my feeling, along with the feeling of both my sons, that teachers of the classics are invariably endearing.
I must have written to say how much I had enjoyed his fine book The Building Of Eternal Rome, and I found he had not regretted giving me the highest mark in his old course on the later Latin poets, although in my final examination I had ignored the questions and filled the bluebook with a comparison of Propertius and Coleridge.
He had written to me about a dinner he had had with the Benedictine monks at St. Anselm's Priory in Washington.
There had been reading at table, especially from two books, Pope Gregory The Great's account of St. Scholastica in his Dialogues and my own The World Of Washington Irving.
He said, "Some have criticized your book as being neither literary criticism nor history.
Of course it was not meant to be.
Some have felt that Washington Irving comes out rather slimly, but let them look at the title of the book".
He felt as I felt about this best of all my books, that it was "really tops".

Two or three times, C. C. Burlingham came to lunch with us in Weston, that wonderful man who lived to be more than a hundred years old and whose birthplace had been my Wall Street suburb.
His reading ranged from Agatha Christie to The Book Of Job and he had an insatiable interest in his fellow-creatures, while his letters were full of gossip about new politicians and old men of letters with whom he had been intimately thrown six decades before.
I could never forget the gaiety with which, when he was both blind and deaf, he let me lead him around his rooms to look at some of the pictures;
and once when he came to see us in New York he walked away in a rainstorm, unwilling to hear of a taxi or even an umbrella, although he was at the time ninety years old.
There were several men of ninety or more whom I knew first or last, all of whom were still productive and most of whom knew one another as if they had naturally come together at the apex of their lives.
I never met John Dewey, whose style was a sort of verbal fog and who had written asking me to go to Mexico with him when he was investigating the cause of Trotsky;
but I liked to think of him at ninety swimming and working at Key West long after Hemingway had moved to Cuba.
At Lee Simonson's house, I had dined with Edith Hamilton, the nonogenarian rationalist and the charming scholar who had a great popular success with The Greek Way.
Then there was Mark Howe and there was Henry Dwight Sedgwick, an accomplished man of letters who wrote in the spirit of Montaigne and produced in the end a formidable body of work.
I saw Sedgwick often before his death at ninety-five, -- he had remarried at the age of ninety, -- and he asked me, when once I returned from Rome, if I knew the Cavallinis in the church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere.
I had to confess that I had missed these frescoes, recently discovered, that he had studied in his eighties.
Sedgwick had chosen to follow the philosophy of Epicurus whom, with his followers, Dante put in hell;
but he defended the doctrine in The Art Of Happiness, and what indeed could be said against the Epicurean virtues, health, frugality, privacy, culture and friendship?
Of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe the philosopher Whitehead said the Earth's first visitors to Mars should be persons likely to make a good impression, and when he was asked, "Whom would you send"?
He replied, "My first choice would be Mark Howe".
This friend of many years came once to visit us in the house at Weston.
Then I spoke at the ninetieth birthday party of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, who embarked on a fictional trilogy at eighty-nine and who, with The Crisis, had created a Negro intelligentsia that had never existed in America before him.
As their interpreter and guide, he had broken with Tuskegee and become a spokesman of the coloured people of the world.

Mr. Burlingham, -- "C.C.B." -- wrote to me once about an old friend of mine, S. K. Ratcliffe, whom I had first met in London in 1914 and who also came out for a week-end in Weston.
"Did you ever know a man with greater zest for information?
And his memory, like an elephant's, stored with precise knowledge of men and things and happenings".
His wife, Katie, "as gay as a lark and as lively as a gazelle", -- she was then seventy-six, -- had "a sense of humour that has been denied S.K., but neither has any aesthetic perceptions.
People and books are enough for them".
S.K. was visiting C.C.B. and, not waiting for breakfast, he was off to the University Club, where he spent hours writing obituaries of living Americans for The Manchester Guardian or The Glasgow Herald.
Later, rising ninety, he was beset by publishers for the story of his life and miracles, as he put it, but, calling himself the Needy Knife-grinder, he had spent his time writing short articles and long letters and could not get even a small popular book done.
Then, all but blind, he said there was nothing in Back to Methuselah --, -- "G.B.S. ought to have known that", -- and "I look at my bookshelves despairingly, knowing that I can have nothing more to do with them".
However, at eighty-five, he had still been busy writing articles, reviewing and speaking, and I had never before known an Englishman who had visited and lectured in three quarters of the United States.
Finally, colleges and clubs took the line that speakers from England were not wanted any longer, even speakers like S.K., so unlike the novelists and poets who had patronized the Americans for many years.
With their facile generalizations about the United States, these mediocrities, as they often were, had been great successes.
While S.K. did not like Dylan Thomas, I liked his poems very much, but I made the mistake of telling Dylan Thomas so, whereupon he said to me, "I suppose you think you know all about me".
I should have replied, "I probably know something about the best part of you".
But I only thought of that in the middle of the night.

Many years later I went to see S.K. in England, where he was living at Whiteleaf, near Aylesbury, and he showed me beside his cottage there the remains of the road on which Boadicea is supposed to have travelled.
He was convinced that George Orwell's 1984 was nearly all wrong as it applied to England, which was "driving forward into uncharted waters", with the danger of a new tyranny ahead.
"But however we go, whatever our doom, it will not take the Orwellian shape".
With facts mainly in his mind, he was often acute in the matter of style, and he said, "The young who have as yet nothing to say will try larks with initial letters and broken lines.
But put them before a situation which they are forced to depict", -- he was speaking of the Spanish civil war, -- "and they have no hesitation;
they merely do their best to make it real for others".