THE FIRST STORY EVER TOLD

Cities of gold have haunted imaginations seemingly forever, but this story of an explorer's search for one such city, the fabled Vilcabamba—inspired by the creation tales of the Incas of Peru—begins and ends in the banal. An anonymous explorer ``discovers'' a map to the city in a museum display—a map that despite the traffic in the museum, no one else has noticed. He follows the map through a romanticized landscape—the Mountains of the Moon, the Valley of Shadow, the River of the Rainbow (yes, a rainbow hovers over it)—gets tired, sleeps. Grandmother Fire visits in the night to tell the explorer the first story ever told, a creation myth, after which he awakens to see ``the jungle shining golden in the early morning light. . . . And he knew that he had found Vilcabamba.'' The language is competent but unmoving; neither words nor illustrations provide a solid basis from which the inner journey- -no matter how valid and important—can be launched. Yoshi's illustrations are surprisingly corny, static, and inconsistent: The explorer looks like a boy in some scenes, a man in others. (Picture book/folklore. 4-8)