David Grann - The Lost City of Z - A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

I sat down on the couch in the living room. There was a book for almost every year from 1906 (his first expedition) to 1921 (his penultimate trip); he had obviously carried a diary on each of his expeditions, jotting down observations. Many of them were replete with maps and surveying calculations. On the inside covers were the poems he had copied down in order to read in the jungle when he was alone and desperate. One seemed meant for Nina:

Oh love, my love! Have all your will-

I am yours to the end.

Fawcett had also scribbled down lines from Ella Wheeler Wilcox's “Solitude”:

But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure

For a long and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Many of the diaries were filled with the mundane, from someone with no expectation of history: “9 July… Sleepless night… Much rain and wet through by midday… 11 July… Heavy rain from midnight. Reached [camp] on trail, caught fish… 17 July… swimming across for balsa.” Then, suddenly, a casual remark revealed the harrowing nature of his existence: “Feel very bad… Took 1 [vial] of morphine last night to rest from foot pain. It produced a violent stomachache and had to put finger down throat to relieve.”

A loud noise sounded in the other room and I looked up. It was Is-abelle playing a video game on the computer. I picked up another of the books. It had a lock to protect the contents. “That's his ‘Treasure Book,' ” Rolette said. The lock was unfastened, and inside were stories Fawcett had collected of buried treasures, like Galla-pita-Galla, and maps of their suspected locations: “In that cave is a treasure, the existence of which is known to me and to me alone.”

In later diaries, as he developed his case for Z, Fawcett made more archaeological notations. There were drawings of strange hieroglyphics. The Botocudo Indians, now virtually extinct, had told him a legend of a city “enormously rich in gold-so much so as to blaze like fire.” Fawcett added, “It is just conceivable this may be Z.” As he seemed to be nearing his goal, he became more secretive. In the 1921 log, he outlined a “code” he had apparently devised, with his wife, to send messages:

78804 Kratzbank = Discoveries much as described

78806 Kratzfuss = Rich, important and wonderful

78808 Kratzka = Cities located-future now secure

Poring through the log, I noticed a word on the margins of one page: “DEAD.” I looked at it more closely and saw two other words alongside it. They spelled out “DEAD HORSE CAMP.” Underneath them were coordinates, and I quickly flipped through my notebook where I had scribbled down the position of the camp from Exploration Fawcett. They were significantly different.

For hours, I went through the diaries, taking notes. I thought there was nothing left to glean, when Rolette appeared and said that she wanted to show me one more item. She vanished into the back room, and I could hear her rummaging through drawers and cabinets, muttering to herself. After several minutes, she emerged with a photograph from a book. “I don't know where I put it,” she said. “But I can at least show you a picture of it.”

It was a photograph of Fawcett's gold signet ring, which was engraved with the family motto, “Nee Áspera Terrent”- essentially, “Difficulties Be Damned.” In 1979, an Englishman named Brian Ridout, who was making a wildlife film in Brazil, heard rumors that the ring had turned up at a store in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso. By the time Ridout tracked down the shop, the proprietor had died. His wife, however, searched through her possessions and found Colonel Fawcett's ring. “It's the last concrete item we have from the expedition,” Rolette said.

She said that she had been desperate to learn more and had once shown the ring to a psychic.

“Did you learn anything?” I asked.

She looked down at the picture, then up at me. “It had been bathed in blood.”

Are you game?” Fawcett asked.

He was back in the jungle not long after his previous expedition, trying to persuade his new second-in-command, Frank Fisher, to explore the Rio Verde, along the Brazilian and Bolivian border.

Fisher, who was a forty-one-year-old English engineer and a member of the RGS, hesitated. The boundary commission had not contracted with the party to explore the Verde-it had asked the men to survey a region in southwest Brazil near Corumbá-but Fawcett insisted on also tracing the river, which was in such uncharted territory that nobody even knew where it began.

Finally, Fisher said, “Oh, I'll come,” though he added, “Surely the contracts don't call for it.”

It was only Fawcett's second South American expedition, but it would prove critical to his understanding of the Amazon and to his evolution as a scientist. With Fisher and seven other recruits, he set out from Corumbá, trekking northwest more than four hundred miles, before shoving off on two makeshift wooden rafts. The rapids, fueled by rains and by steep descents, were intense, and the rafts were propelled over precipices before tumbling down into the foam and rocks-the grinding roar-as the men hollered to hold on and Fawcett, eyes flashing, Stetson cocked, steered with a bamboo pole held to one side, so it wouldn't spear his chest. White-water rafting was not yet a sport, but Fawcett anticipated it: “When… the enterprising traveler has to construct and manage his own balsa [raft], he will realize an exhilaration and excitement that few sports provide.” Still, it was one thing to ride the rapids of a familiar river, and another to descend unmarked chutes that might at any moment drop hundreds of feet. If a member of the party fell overboard, he could not grab onto a raft without capsizing it. The only honorable course was to drown.

The explorers paddled past the Ricardo Franco Hills, eerie sandstone plateaus that rose three thousand feet. “Time and the foot of man had not touched those summits,” Fawcett wrote. “They stood like a lost world, forested to their tops, and the imagination could picture the last vestiges of an age long vanished.” (Conan Doyle reportedly based the setting of The Lost World at least partly on these tablelands.)

As Fawcett and his team wound through the canyon, the rapids became impassable.

“What'll we do now?” one of the men asked.

“There's no help for it,” Fawcett said. “We must leave all we can't carry on our back and follow the river's course by land.”

Fawcett ordered the men to keep only their essential items: hammocks, rifles, mosquito nets, and surveying instruments.

What about our stores of food? Fisher asked.

Fawcett said they'd bring only enough rations for a few days. Then they'd have to live off the land, like the Indians whose fire they had seen burning in the distance.

Despite cutting, chopping, pulling, and pushing through jungle from morning till night, they usually advanced no more than half a mile per day. Their legs sank in mud. Their shoes disintegrated. Their eyes blurred from a tiny species of bee that is drawn to sweat, and that invaded their pupils. (Brazilians called the bees “eye lickers.”) Still, Fawcett counted his paces and crawled up banks to better see the stars and to fix their position, as if reducing the wilderness to figures and diagrams might enable him to overcome it. His men didn't need such signposts. They knew where they were: the green hell.

The men were supposed to conserve their rations, but most broke down and consumed them quickly. By the ninth day of marching, the expedition had run out of food. It was now that Fawcett discovered what explorers since Orellana had learned and what would become the basis of the scientific theory of a counterfeit paradise: in the world's thickest jungle, it was hard to find a morsel to eat.