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

While Vajuvi, Paolo, and I were talking, a man named Vanite Kala-palo entered the house and sat down beside us. He seemed despondent. It was his job, he said, to guard one of the posts on the reservation. The other day, an Indian had come to him and said, “Listen, Vanite. You must come with me down the river. The white people are building something in Afasukugu.” The word “Afasukugu” meant “the place of the big cats;” at this site, the Xinguanos believe, the first humans were created. Vanite picked up a stick and drew a map on the mud floor. “Here is Afasukugu,” he said. “It is by a waterfall.”

“It is outside the park,” Vajuvi, the chief, added. “But it is sacred.”

I remembered Fawcett had mentioned in one of his last letters that he had learned from the Indians of a sacred waterfall in the same area, which he hoped to visit.

Vanite continued with his story: “So I said, ‘I will go with you to Afasukugu, but you are crazy. Nobody would build anything at the place of the jaguars.' But when I get there the waterfall is destroyed. They blew it up with thirty kilos of dynamite. The place was so beautiful, and now it is gone. And I ask a man working there, ‘What are you doing?' He says, ‘We are building a hydroelectric dam.' ”

“It is in the middle of the Kuluene River,” Vajuvi said. “All the water from there flows right into our park and into our territory.”

Vanite, who was becoming agitated, didn't seem to hear the chief. He said, “A man from the Mato Grosso government comes to the Xingu and tells us, ‘Do not worry. This dam will not hurt you.' And he offers each of us money. One of the chiefs from another tribe took the money, and the tribes are now fighting with each other. For me, the money means nothing. The river has been here for thousands of years. We don't live forever, but the river does. The god Taugi created the river. It gives us our food, our medicines. You see, we don't have a well. We drink water right from the river. How will we live without it?”

Vajuvi said, “If they succeed, the river will disappear and, with it, all our people.”

Our search for Fawcett and the City of Z suddenly felt trivial- another tribe appeared to be on the verge of extinction. But later that night, after we bathed in the river, Vajuvi said that there was something he had to tell Paolo and me about the Englishmen. The next day, he promised, he would take us by boat to where the bones had been discovered. Before going to bed, he added, “There are many things about the Englishmen that only Kalapalo people know.”

THE NEXT MORNING, as we got ready to depart, one of the girls in our house removed a piece of cloth from a large object in the corner of the room, near an array of masks. Underneath was a television set, which was powered by the village's sole generator.

The girl turned a knob, sat down on the mud floor, and began watching a cartoon featuring a raucous Woody Woodpecker-like bird. Within minutes, at least twenty other children and several adults from the village had gathered around the set.

As Vajuvi came to retrieve us, I asked him how long he had owned a television. “Only a few years,” he said. “At first, all everyone did is stare at it in a trance. But now I control the generator, and it is on only a few hours a week.”

Several of the men watching the television got their bows and arrows and went out to hunt. Meanwhile, Paolo and I followed Vajuvi and one of his sons, who was five years old, down to the river. “I thought we would catch our lunch, the way Kalapalos do,” Vajuvi said.

We climbed into one of the motorboats and headed upriver. A mist that covered the forest slowly dissipated as the sun rose. The river, dark and muddy, occasionally narrowed into a chute so tight that tree branches hung over our heads like bridges. Eventually, we entered an inlet covered by a tangle of floating leaves. “The green lagoon,” Vajuvi said.

He cut the engine, and the boat slid quietly through the water. Terns with yellow beaks fluttered amid the rosewood and cedar trees, and swallows zigzagged above the lagoon, shimmering white specks on the blanket of green. A pair of macaws cackled and screamed, and on the shore deer stood as still as the water. A small caiman scurried up the banks.

“You must always be careful in the jungle,” Vajuvi said. “I listen to my dreams. If I have a dream of danger, then I stay in the village. Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams.”

The Xinguanos were famous for fishing with bows and arrows, their bodies perched silently on the fronts of canoes-a pose that Jack and Raleigh had excitedly caught on camera, sending the images back to the Museum of the American Indian. Vajuvi and his son, however, took out some fishing lines and baited the hooks. Then they spun the lines over their heads like lassos and sent the hooks sailing into the center of the lagoon.

As Vajuvi pulled in his line, he pointed to the shore and said, “Up that way is where the bones were dug up. But they were not Fawcett's bones-they were my grandfather's.”

“Your grandfather's?” I asked.

“Yes. Mugika-that was his name. He was dead when Orlando Villas Boas began to ask about Fawcett. Orlando wanted to protect us from all the white people coming in, and he told the Kalapalo people, ‘If you find a tall skeleton, I will give each of you a rifle.' My grandfather was one of the tallest men in the village. So several people in the village decide to dig up his bones and bury them out here by the lagoon and say they are Fawcett's.”

As he spoke, his son's line went taut. He helped the boy pull it in, and a silvery white fish burst out of the water, flapping wildly on the hook. I leaned in to inspect it, but Vajuvi jerked me out of the way and began to club it with a stick.

“Piranha,” he said.

I looked down at the fish, with its low-hung jaw, lying on the aluminum floor of the boat. Vajuvi opened its mouth with a knife, revealing a set of sharp interlocking teeth-teeth that the Indians sometimes used to scrape their flesh in purification rituals. After he removed the hook, he continued, “My father, Tadjui, was away at the time, and he was furious when he found out what the people did. But the bones had already been taken away.”

Other evidence seemed to corroborate his story. As Brian Fawcett had noted at the time, many of the Kalapalos told contradictory versions of how the explorers had actually been killed: some said they were clubbed, others maintained that they were shot with arrows from afar. In addition, the Kalapalos insisted that Fawcett had been murdered because he had not brought any gifts and had slapped a young Kalapalo boy, yet this was at odds with Fawcett's long history of gentle behavior toward Indians. More significant, I later found an internal memo in the archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute, in London, which had examined the bones. It stated:

The upper jaw provides the clearest possible evidence that these human remains were not those of Colonel Fawcett, whose spare upper denture is fortunately available for comparison… Colonel Fawcett is stated to have been six feet, one and a half inches tall. The height of the man whose remains have been brought to England is estimated at about five feet, seven inches.

“I would like to get the bones back and bury them where they belong,” Vajuvi said.

After catching half a dozen piranhas, we glided to shore. Vajuvi gathered several sticks and built a fire. Without skinning the piranhas, he laid them on the wood, grilling one side, then the other. He put the blackened fish on a bed of leaves and tore several pieces off the bone. He wrapped the fish in beiju, a kind of pancake bread made from manioc flour, handing each of us a sandwich. As we ate, he said, “I will tell you what my parents told me really happened to the Englishmen. It is true that they were here. There were three of them, and no one knew who they were or why they had come. They had no animals and carried packs on their backs. One, who was the chief, was old, and the two others were young. They were hungry and tired from marching for so long, and the people in the village gave them fish and beiju. In return for their help, the Englishmen offered them fishhooks, which no one had seen before. And knives. Finally, the old man said, ‘We must be going now.' The people asked them, ‘Where are you going?' And they said, ‘That way. To the east.' We said, ‘Nobody goes that way. That's where the hostile Indians are. They will kill you.' But the old man insisted. And so they went.” Vajuvi pointed eastward and shook his head. “In those days, nobody went that way,” he said. For several days, he continued, the Kalapalos could see smoke above the trees-Fawcett's campfire-but on the fifth day it disappeared. Vajuvi said that a group of Kalapalos, fearing that something bad had happened to them, tried to find their camp. But there was no trace of the Englishmen.