The Lost City of Z (22 page)

I
am afraid there is no way for you to see the document. It’s locked in a vault.”

I had arrived in Rio de Janeiro and was speaking on the phone to a university student who had been helping me track down one more manuscript, what Fawcett considered the final piece of evidence supporting his theory of a lost civilization in the Amazon. The manuscript was in Brazil’s National Library in Rio, and was so old and in such poor condition that it was kept in a safe. I had filed formal requests and made appeals by e-mail. Nothing worked. Finally, as a last effort, I had flown to Rio to make my case in person.

Situated downtown in a beautiful neoclassical building with Corinthian columns and pilasters, the library contains more than nine million documents—the largest archive in Latin America. I was escorted upstairs into the manuscript division, a chamber lined with books that climbed several stories toward a stained-glass ceiling, where a faint light seeped through, revealing, amid the room’s grandeur, a hint of disrepair—dilapidated wooden
desks and dusty lightbulbs. The area was quiet, and I could hear the soles of my shoes clapping against the floor.

I had arranged an appointment with the head of the manuscript division, Vera Faillace, an erudite woman with shoulder-length dark hair and glasses. She greeted me at the security gate, and when I inquired about the document she said, “It is, without question, the most famous and sought-after item we have in the manuscript division.”

“How many manuscripts do you have?” I asked, surprised.

“Around eight hundred thousand.”

She said that scientists and treasure hunters from all over the world have wanted to study this particular document. After it became known that Fawcett had drawn on the manuscript for his theory, she said, his devotees have treated it almost like a religious icon. Apparently, it was the Holy Grail for the Fawcett freaks.

I had rehearsed everything I planned to say to persuade her to let me see the original document, including how important it was for me to assess its authenticity and how I promised not to touch it—a speech that began soberly enough but grew, in my desperation, more abstract and grandiose. Yet before I could start Faillace waved me through the security gate. “This must be very important to you to come all this way without knowing you’d be able to see the document,” she said. “I’ve put it on the table for you.”

And there, only a few feet away, opened like a Torah, was the roughly sixteen-inch-by-sixteen-inch manuscript. Its pages had turned almost a golden brown; its edges had crumbled. “This paper is not parchment,” Faillace explained. “It was from before wood pulp was added to paper. It’s a kind of fabric.”

Scrawled across the pages, in black ink, was beautiful calligraphy, but many sections had been washed out or eaten through by worms and insects.

I looked at the title on the top of the first page. It said in Portuguese,
“Historical account of a large, hidden, and very ancient city . . . discovered in the year 1753.”

“Can you make out the next sentence?” I asked Faillace.

She shook her head, but farther down more words became legible, and a librarian who spoke fluent English helped me to slowly translate them. They had been written by a Portuguese
bandeirante,
or “soldier of fortune.” (His name was no longer decipherable.) He described how he and his men, “incited by the insatiable greed of gold,” had set out into the interior of Brazil in search of treasure: “After a long and troublesome peregrination . . .. and almost lost for many years . . . we discovered a chain of mountains so high that they seemed to reach the ethereal regions, and they served as throne for the Wind or for the Stars themselves.” Eventually, the
bandeirante
said, he and his party found a path between the mountains that appeared to have been “cut asunder by art rather than by nature.” When they reached the top of the path, they looked out and saw a spellbinding vista: below them were the ruins of an ancient city. At dawn, the men loaded their weapons and crept down. Amid swarms of bats, they discovered stone archways, a statue, roads, and a temple. “The ruins well showed the size and grandeur which must have been there, and how populous and opulent it had been in the age when it flourished,” the
bandeirante
wrote.

After the expedition returned to civilization, the
bandeirante
had sent the document with this “intelligence” to the viceroy, “in remembrance of the much that I owe to you.” He urged his “Excellency” to dispatch an expedition to find and “utilize these riches.”

It is not known what the viceroy did with the report, or if the
bandeirante
ever tried to reach the city again. Fawcett had uncovered the manuscript when he was scouring for documents in the National Library of Brazil. For more than a century after the manuscript was written, Fawcett said, it had been “pigeonholed” in bureaucratic archives. “It was difficult for an administration steeped in the narrow bigotry of an all-powerful Church to give much credence to such a thing as an old civilization,” Fawcett wrote.

The librarian pointed to the bottom of the manuscript. “Look at that,” she said.

There were several strange diagrams that resembled hieroglyphics. The
bandeirante
said that he had observed the images carved into some of the ruins. They seemed familiar, and I realized that they were identical to drawings I had noticed in one of Fawcett’s diaries—he must have copied them after seeing the document.

The library was closing, and Faillace came to retrieve the ancient scroll. As I watched her carefully transport it back into the vault, I understood why Brian Fawcett, seeing the document years after his father and brother vanished, had proclaimed, “It feels genuine! It
must
be genuine!”

F
awcett had narrowed down the location. He was sure that he had found proof of archaeological remains, including causeways and pottery, scattered throughout the Amazon. He even believed that there was more than a single ancient city—the one that the
bandeirante
described was most likely, given the terrain, near the eastern Brazilian state of Bahia. But Fawcett, consulting archival records and interviewing tribesmen, had calculated that a monumental city, along with possibly even remnants of its population, was in the jungle surrounding the Xingu River in the Brazilian Mato Grosso. In keeping with his secretive nature, he gave the city a cryptic and alluring name, one that, in all his writings and interviews, he never explained. He called it simply Z.

In September of 1914, after a yearlong reconnaissance trip with Manley and Costin, Fawcett was ready to launch an expedition in search of the lost city. Yet when he emerged from the jungle he was greeted with the news that, more than two months earlier, the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand—who was the unlikely catalyst for Fawcett and Nina’s first meeting in Ceylon—had been assassinated. World War I had begun.

Fawcett and his two British companions immediately set sail for England. “Of course experienced men like you are very much wanted: there is a great deficiency of trained officers,” Keltie told Fawcett in a letter that December. “We have had tremendous losses, as you see, at the front, far more in proportion, I should think, than has ever been among officers before.” Though Fawcett was forty-seven years old and a “renegade” from European life, he felt compelled to volunteer. He informed Keltie that he had his “finger on important discoveries” in the Amazon, but was obliged by “the patriotic desire of all able-bodied men to squash the Teuton.”

Most of Europe was gripped by a similar zeal. Conan Doyle, who churned out propaganda that portrayed the war as a clash of chivalrous knights, wrote, “Fear not, for our sword will not be broken, nor shall it ever drop from our hands.”

After a brief visit with his family, Fawcett made his way to the western front, where, as he told Keltie, he would soon be “in the thick of it.”

As a major in the Royal Field Artillery, Fawcett was placed in charge of a battery of more than a hundred men. Cecil Eric Lewis Lyne, a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant, recalled when the Amazon explorer arrived in his dark khaki uniform, carrying his revolver. He was, Lyne wrote in a diary, “one of the most colorful personalities I ever encountered”—a man of “magnificent physique and great technical ability.”

As always, Fawcett was an electric and polarizing figure, and his men fell into two camps: the Costins and the Murrays. The Costins gravitated toward him, relishing his daring and élan, while the Murrays despised his ferocity and unforgivingness. An officer among the Murrays said that Fawcett “was probably the nastiest man I have ever met in this world and his dislike of me was only exceeded by my dislike of him.” Yet Lyne was a Costin. “Fawcett and I, despite the disparity of our ages, became great friends.”

Along with their men, Fawcett and Lyne dug trenches—sometimes only a few hundred yards from the Germans—in the area around Ploegsteert, a hamlet in western Belgium, near the border of France. One day
Fawcett spotted a suspicious-looking figure in the village wearing a long fur coat, a French steel helmet three sizes too small for his head, and a shepherd’s smock—“queer garments,” as Fawcett put it. Fawcett overheard the man saying, in a guttural voice, that this area would be ideal for an observation post, even though it struck Fawcett as “a bloody awful place.” German spies were rumored to be infiltrating British lines dressed as Belgian civilians, and Fawcett, who knew what it meant to be a secret agent, rushed back to headquarters and reported, “We’ve got a spy in our sector!”

Before an arrest party was dispatched, further inquiries revealed that the man was none other than Winston Churchill, who had volunteered to command a battalion on the western front after being forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty in the wake of the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli. While visiting the trenches south of Fawcett’s position, Churchill wrote, “Filth & rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences & scattered about promiscuously, feet & clothing breaking through the soil, water & muck on all sides; & about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of enormous bats creep & glide, to the unceasing accompaniment of rifles & machine guns & the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets which pass overhead.”

Fawcett, who was accustomed to inhuman conditions, was superb at holding his position, and in January 1916 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and put in command of a brigade of more than seven hundred men. Nina kept Keltie and the Royal Geographical Society apprised of his activities. In a letter dated March 2, 1916, she wrote, “He is very well in spite of 3 months constantly under shell fire.” Several weeks later, she said that he was overseeing nine batteries, far more than constituted a typical brigade. “So you can imagine how hard worked he is,” she said, adding, “Of course I am glad he has an opportunity to use his powers of organization and leadership for it all helps in the struggle for victory.” Nina was not the only one who touted his abilities. He was repeatedly cited in dispatches for his “gallant” and “distinguished” services under fire.

Even in the trenches, Fawcett tried to keep informed of events in the Amazon. He learned of expeditions being led by anthropologists and explorers from America, which was not yet engaged in the war, and these reports only intensified his fear that someone would discover Z before he did. In a letter to his old teaching mentor Reeves, he confided, “If you only knew what these expeditions cost in physical strain, you would, I feel sure, appreciate what a lot it means to me that I shall have the completion of the work.”

He had reason to fret, in particular, about Dr. Rice. To Fawcett’s shock, the RGS had, in 1914, presented Dr. Rice with a gold medal for his “meritorious work on the head waters of the Orinoco and the Northern tributaries of the Amazon.” Fawcett was incensed that his own efforts had not received equal recognition. Then, in early 1916, he discovered that the doctor was preparing to launch another expedition. A bulletin in the
Geographical Journal
announced that “our medallist” Dr. Rice would ascend the Amazon and the Rio Negro, with “a view to still further extending our knowledge of the region previously explored by him.” Why was the doctor returning to the same area? The bulletin said little more than that Dr. Rice was building a forty-foot motor-powered vessel that could navigate through swamps and carry seven hundred gallons of petrol. It must have cost a fortune, though what did that matter to a millionaire?