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

I subsequently learned that what his parents had shared with him was an oral history, which had been passed down for generations with remarkable consistency. In 1931, Vincenzo Petrullo, an anthropologist who worked for the Pennsylvania University Museum, in Philadelphia, and who was one of the first whites to enter the Xingu, reported hearing a similar account, though amid all the sensationalist tales few had paid much attention to it. Some fifty years later, Ellen Basso, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, recorded a more detailed version from a Kalapalo named Kambe, who was a boy when Fawcett and his party arrived in the village. She translated his account directly from the Kalapalo language, maintaining the epic rhythms of the tribe's oral histories:

One of them remained by himself.

While he sang, he played a musical instrument.

His musical instrument worked like this, like this…

He sang and sang.

He put his arm around me this way.

While he was playing we watched the Christians.

While he was playing.

Father and the others.

Then, “I'll have to be going,” he said.

Kambe also recounted how they could see their fire:

“There's the Christians' fire,” we said to one another.

That was going on as the sun set.

The next day as the sun set, again their fire rose up.

The following day again, just a little smoke, spread out in the sky.

On this day, mbouk, their fire had gone out…

It looked as if the Englishmen's fire was no longer alive, as if it had been put out.

“What a shame! Why did he keep insisting they go away?”

When Vajuvi finished his version of the oral history, he said, “People always say the Kalapalos killed the Englishmen. But we did not. We tried to save them.”

The room was dark. Nina Fawcett sat on one side of a table; on the other was a woman peering into a crystal ball. Nina, after years of searching for her husband and son in this world, had begun to look in another dimension.

She surrounded herself with psychics and soothsayers, many of whom sent her long letters detailing their attempts to contact the explorers. One medium told her that she was conscious of a presence in the room and, looking up, saw Fawcett standing by the window. The medium said that she asked him, “Are you alive or dead?” and Fawcett laughed and replied, “Can't you see that I am alive?” He added, “Give my love to Nina and tell her we are all right.”

On another occasion, a medium reported that a young figure with a long beard floated before her. It was Jack. “We shall see you someday,” he said. Then he vanished, leaving “a most beautiful scent behind.”

Fawcett's brother, Edward, told the RGS of Nina's descent into the occult, “Her life flows more easily thus.”

She was not the only one who turned to psychics to find answers to what the visible world stubbornly refused to reveal. Toward the end of his life, Reeves, Fawcett's mentor at the RGS, had shocked his colleagues by becoming a spiritualist-or what was sometimes called a “spiritual surveyor.” In the 1930s, he attended séances, searching for clues to Fawcett's fate. So did Fawcett's friend Sir Ralph Paget, the former Brazilian ambassador. In the early 1940s, while attending a gathering in Seaford, England, at the house of the psychic Nell Montague, Paget placed a letter from Fawcett on the medium's crystal ball. Montague said that she saw three flickering white figures. One lay motionless on the ground. Another, who was older, was struggling to breathe and was clutching at a man with long hair and a beard. The crystal ball suddenly turned red, as if it were drenched in blood. Then Montague said she saw Indians with spears and arrows carrying off the three white men. The people in the room gasped. For the first time, Paget felt that his friend was dead.

In 1949, Geraldine Cummins, a celebrated practitioner of “automatism,” whereby a person purportedly goes into a trance and writes down messages from spirits, described how Jack and Raleigh were massacred by Indians. “ Pain- stop pain!” Raleigh gasped, before dying. Fawcett, Cummins reported, eventually collapsed in a state of delirium: “The voices and sounds became a distant murmur as I now faced the greyness of death. It is a moment of unearthly horror… a time when the universe seems implacable and abiding loneliness apparent as the destiny of man.”

Although Nina dismissed such reports, she knew that she was facing her own mortality. Even before Cummins's prophecy, Brian Fawcett, who was caring for Nina in Peru, wrote to Joan, “I really don't think her days on earth will be many!… She herself would be the first to claim she was breaking up.” Once, Nina woke at two in the morning and wrote to Joan that she had a vision that she “must be prepared for ‘the Call' at any moment.” She thought, “Have you really and truly asked yourself: Have I any fear of Death and the Hereafter?” She hoped her passing would be easy- “perhaps I would go to sleep and not wake up.” Brian told his sister, “In a way it would be a good thing for her to go out here. There would be a rather pleasing thought in her leaving her remains in the same continent as her husband and… son.”

With her health deteriorating, Nina told Brian that she needed to give him something important. She opened a trunk, revealing all of Fawcett's logbooks and diaries. “The time has come to hand over to you all the documents in my possession,” she said.

Though Brian was only in his late thirties, his life had been scarred by death: not only had he lost his father and brother, but his first wife had died of diabetes when she was seven months pregnant. He had since remarried, yet there were no children, and he suffered spells of what he called “wild, despairing sorrows.”

Brian now looked at his father's papers, which he described as “the pathetic relics of a disaster whose nature we had no means of knowing.” Over the next several weeks, he carried the papers to work with him. After more than twenty years as a railroad engineer, he was bored and restless. “I feel that I am wasting my life, just going to a lousy office every day, signing a lot of stupid papers, and driving back again!” he confided to Joan. “It leads nowhere.” He went on, “Others can find immortality in their children. That is denied me, and I want to seek it.”

During his lunch break, he would read through his father's papers, picturing Fawcett “on his expeditions, sharing with him the hardships, seeing through his eyes the great objective.” Resentful about not being chosen for the expedition, Brian had once professed little interest in his father's work. Now he was consumed by it. He decided to quit his job and stitch together the fragmentary writings into Exploration Fawcett. As he worked tirelessly on the manuscript, Brian told his mother, “Daddy seems very close to me, as though I were collaborating at his conscious direction. Naturally, there are times when it tugs at my heart strings a lot.” When Brian completed a draft, in April 1952, he gave a copy to Nina, telling her, “It really is quite a ‘monumental' work, and I think Daddy would have been proud of it.” Lying in bed, Nina began to turn the pages. “I simply couldn't put it down!” she wrote to Joan. “I bundled into my night clothes after supper and read that book till 4 a.m.” It was as if her husband were right beside her; all the memories of him and Jack flooded into her mind. Upon finishing the manuscript, she exclaimed, “Bravo! Bravo!”

The book, published in 1953, became an international sensation and was praised by Graham Greene and Harold Nicolson. Not long after, Nina died, at the age of eighty-four. Brian and Joan had no longer been able to care for her, and she had been staying in a run-down boardinghouse in Brighton, England, demented and virtually penniless. As one observer noted, she had “sacrificed” her life to her husband and his memory.