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

In the early 1950s, Brian decided to conduct his own expeditions in search of the missing explorers. He suspected that his father, who would be approaching ninety, was dead and that Raleigh, owing to his infirmities, had perished soon after leaving Dead Horse Camp. But Jack-he was the cause of Brian's gnawing doubt. What if he had survived? After all, Jack was strong and young when the party had disappeared. Brian sent a letter to the British Embassy in Brazil, asking for help in securing permission to carry out a search effort. He explained that no one had legally presumed his brother dead and that he could not do so “without satisfying myself that all has been done.” Moreover, such a mission might bring about the “return to his own country of one who has been lost for thirty years.” British officials thought Brian “just as mad as his father,” as one diplomat put it in a private communiqué, and refused to facilitate his “suicide.”

Still, Brian forged ahead with his plans and boarded a ship to Brazil; his arrival there touched off a media storm. “Briton to Hunt Dad, Brother Lost in Jungle,” the Chicago Daily Tribune declared. Brian purchased an explorer's outfit and carried a sketchbook and logbook. A Brazilian who had been a friend of his father's gasped when he saw Brian. “But… but… I thought you were dead!” he said.

Brian told his sister that he was becoming an explorer in spite of himself, but he knew that he would never survive trekking in the wilderness. Instead, relying on the means that Dr. Rice had pioneered decades earlier and that were now more affordable, he rented a tiny propeller plane and, with a pilot, canvassed the jungle from the air. He dropped thousands of leaflets that fluttered over the trees like snow. The leaflets asked, “Are you Jack Fawcett? If your answer is yes, then make this sign holding arms above your head… Can you control the Indians if we land?”

He never received a response or found any evidence of Jack. But on another expedition he looked for the object of his brother and father's quest: the City of Z. “Fate must surely have guided my steps along this path for a purpose,” Brian wrote. Peering through binoculars, he spied on a distant ridge a crumbling city with streets and towers and pyramids. “That looks like it!” the pilot shouted. But, as the plane got closer, they realized that it was simply an outcropping of freakishly eroded sandstone. “The illusion was remarkable-almost unbelievable,” Brian said. And, as the days wore on, he began to fear what he had never allowed himself to consider-that there had never been a Z. As he later wrote, “The whole romantic structure of fallacious beliefs, already rocking dangerously, collapsed about me, leaving me dazed.” Brian started questioning some of the strange papers that he had found among his father's collection, and never divulged. Originally, Fawcett had described Z in strictly scientific terms and with caution: “I do not assume that ‘The City' is either large or rich.” But by 1924 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into “the cradle of all civilizations” and the center of one of Blavatsky's “White Lodges,” where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to direct the fate of the universe. Fawcett hoped to discover a White Lodge that had been there since “the time of Atlantis,” and to attain transcendence. Brian wrote in his diary, “Was Daddy's whole conception of ‘Z,' a spiritual objective, and the manner of reaching it a religious allegory?” Was it possible that three lives had been lost for “an objective that had never existed”? Fawcett himself had scribbled in a letter to a friend, “Those whom the Gods intend to destroy they first make mad!”

The cave is over in those mountains,” the Brazilian businessman said. “That's where Fawcett descended into the subterranean city and is still alive.”

Before Paolo and I headed into the jungle, we had stopped in Barra do Garças, a town near the Roncador Mountains, in the northeast corner of Mato Grosso. Many Brazilians had told us that, over the past few decades, religious cults had sprung up in the area that worshipped Fawcett as a kind of god. They believed that Fawcett had entered a network of underground tunnels and discovered that Z was, of all things, a portal to another reality. Even though Brian Fawcett had concealed his father's bizarre writings at the end of his life, these mystics had seized upon Fawcett's few cryptic references, in magazines such as the Occult Review, to his search for “the treasures of the invisible World.” These writings, coupled with Fawcett's disappearance and the failure of anyone over the years to discover his remains, fueled the notion that he had somehow defied the laws of physics.

One sect, called the Magical Nucleus, was started, in 1968, by a man named Udo Luckner, who referred to himself as the High Priest of the Roncador and wore a long white gown and a cylindrical hat with a Star of David. In the 1970s, scores of Brazilians and Europeans, including Fawcett's great-nephew, flocked to join the Magical Nucleus, hoping to find this portal. Luckner built a religious compound by the Roncador Mountains, where families were forbidden to eat meat or wear jewelry. Luckner predicted that the world would end in 1982 and said that his people must prepare to descend into the hollow earth. But, when the planet remained in existence, the Magical Nucleus gradually disbanded.

More mystics continued to come to the Roncador Mountains in search of this Other World. One was the Brazilian businessman whom Paolo and I had encountered in the small town. Short and pudgy, and in his late forties, he told us that he had been at “a loss for my purpose in life,” when he had met a psychic who taught him about spiritualism and the underground portal. He said that he was now training to purify himself, in the hopes of eventually going down.

Amazingly, others were making similar preparations. In 2005, a Greek explorer had announced plans on an Internet site-the Great Web of Percy Harrison Fawcett, which requires a secret code to access-for an expedition to find “the same portal or the doorway to a Kingdom that was entered by Colonel Fawcett in 1925.” The trek, which has yet to take place, will include psychic guides and is billed as an “Expedition of No Return in the Ethereal Place of the Unbelief.” It promises participants they will be no longer humans but “beings from another dimension, which means that we shall never die, we shall never get sick, we shall never grow up.” Just as the world's blank spaces were disappearing, these people had constructed their own permanent dreamscape.

Before Paolo and I left, the businessman warned us, “You will never find Z as long as you look for it in this world.”

NOT LONG AFTER Paolo and I had met with the Kalapalos, I contemplated for the first time ending our search. Paolo and I were both tired and pocked with mosquito bites and had begun to quarrel. I had also come down with a severe stomach ailment, most likely from a parasite. One morning, I slipped away from the Kalapalo village with the satellite phone that I had brought. Paolo had advised me not to advertise that I had it, and I carried it in a small bag into the jungle. Crouching amid the leaves and vines, I removed the phone, trying to get a signal. After several failed tries, I received one and dialed home. “David, is that you?” Kyra asked, picking up.

“Yes. Yes. It's me,” I said. “How are you? How's Zachary?”

“I can't hear you very well. Where are you?”