The brutally honest story of three Americans, part of the backwash of the Depression, anonymous, jobless and rootless, who search for a legendary Aztec gold mine, is not only a classic adventure tale but a contemporary version of the quest for El Dorado. His ability to render the times and the terrain - the primitive beauty of the stark Mexican landscape and its unheeding destruction of the civilization-scarred prospectors - gives concreteness to Traven’s powerful moral fable of the dilemma of modern life.