There were seven of them when they left the summer camp of Coronado's army and struck out into that unknown land, which now our great Southwest, to find the golden cities of Cibola.

Of the seven, Captain Mendoza and his three soldiers were drawn by their greed for treasure; Father Francisco went for the love of the souls he hoped to save; Esteban de Sandoval, whose story this is, thought only of the maps he would draw of the countries still unseen and scarcely dreamed of in the courts of Spain; and Zia, the Indian girl, their guide and interpreter, who saw more clearly than the others the hazards of the dangerous journey.

For Esteban it was all a glorious adventure until that moment when he held in his hand a piece of the gleaming metal and for the first time felt its awful alchemy. As one city after another — Chicilticale, Hawikuh, Nexpan City of the Abyss, Tawhi  the City of the Clouds — is conquered by the conquistadors in their search for the shining hoard, this alchemy seizes upon the expedition until all is sacrificed to the lust for gold — blood, honor, sanity — life itself.

But even as Esteban survives the hardships of mountains and desert, the evil of ruthless men, so does he make his way across the country of the mind. The two journeys follow parallel courses, and for each it seems that a maker of maps, no matter what his skill with cross staff and astrolabe or knowledge of the stars, still needs a guide to find his way.

In this deeply affecting novel Scott O'Dell envelops the reader in the heroic world of the conquistadors — a world that is at once somber and many-colored. Ruthless they may have been, these steel-helmeted young men of Spain, but they lived their lives on the very edge of eternity with style and uncommon courage.

From the dust jacket