The Lost City of Z (30 page)

In spite of the risks, Fawcett was confident—after all, he had always succeeded where others failed. “It is obviously dangerous to penetrate large hordes of Indians traditionally hostile,” he wrote, “but I believe in my
mission and in its purpose. The rest does not worry me, for I have seen a good deal of Indians and know what to do and what not to do.” He added, “I believe our little party of three white men will make friends with them all.”

The guides, who were already feverish, were reluctant to go any farther, and Fawcett decided that the time had come to send them back. He selected half a dozen or so of the strongest animals to keep for a few more days. Then the explorers would have to proceed with their few provisions on their backs.

Fawcett pulled Raleigh aside and encouraged him to return with the guides. As Fawcett had written to Nina, “I suspect constitutional weakness, and fear that we shall be handicapped by him.” After this point, Fawcett explained, there would be no way to carry him out. Raleigh insisted that he would see it through. Perhaps he remained loyal to Jack, in spite of everything. Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen as a coward. Or perhaps he was simply afraid to turn back without them.

Fawcett finished his last letters and dispatches. He wrote that he would try to get out other communiqués in the coming year or so, but added that it was unlikely. As he noted in one of his final articles, “By the time this dispatch is printed, we shall have long since disappeared into the unknown.”

After folding up his missives, Fawcett gave them to the guides. Raleigh had earlier written to his “dearest Mother” and family. “I shall look forward to seeing you again in old Cal when I return,” he said. And he told his brother bravely, “Keep cheerful and things will turn up alright as they have for me.”

The explorers gave a final wave to the Brazilians, then turned and headed deeper into the jungle. In his last words to his wife, Fawcett wrote, “You need have no fear of any failure.”

C
an you get the GPS to work?” Paolo asked.

I was sitting in the backseat of a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi truck, fiddling with a Global Positioning System in an attempt to obtain readings of our coordinates. We were heading north—that much I knew—with a driver whom we had hired when we rented the pickup. Paolo had told me that we would need a powerful truck and a professional driver if we were to have any chance of completing our journey, especially in the rainy season. “This is the worst time of year,” he said. “The roads are—how do you say in English?
—shit.”

When I explained my mission to our driver, he asked me when the British colonel had disappeared.

“Nineteen twenty-five,” I said.

“And you want to find him in the jungle?”

“Not exactly.”

“Are you one of his descendants?”

“No.”

He seemed to think about this for a long moment, then said, “Very
well,” and began cheerfully to load our gear, which included hammocks, rope, mosquito netting, water-purifying tablets, a satellite phone, antibiotics, and malarial pills. On our way out of Cuiabá, we also picked up a friend of Paolo’s, a descendant of a Bakairí chief named Taukane Bakairí. (In Brazil, the last names of Indians are typically the same as that of their tribe.) Taukane, who was in his mid-forties and had a handsome, round face, wore Levi’s and a baseball cap. He had been educated by missionaries, and though he now lived mostly in Cuiabá, he continued to represent his tribe’s political interests. “I am what you might call an ambassador,” he told me. And, in exchange for a “gift” of two tires for a communal tractor, he had agreed to take us to his village, the last place that Fawcett had incontrovertibly been seen. (“If it were up to me, I would take you for free,” Taukane said. “But all Indians must now be capitalists. We have no choice.”)

Upon leaving the city, we entered the central plains of Brazil, which mark the transition from dry forest to rain forest. After a while, a plateau came into view: Martian red in color, it spanned more than two thousand square miles, an endless tabletop that reached into the clouds. We stopped at its base, and Paolo said, “Come, I show you something.”

We left the truck and climbed a steep, rocky slope. The ground was moist from a recent rainstorm, and we used our hands and knees to ascend, crawling over holes where snakes and armadillos had burrowed.

“Where are we going?” I asked Paolo, who had another cigarette clamped between his teeth.

“You Americans are always impatient,” he said.

Lightning streaked the sky and a thin mist descended, making the ground more slippery. Rocks gave way under our feet, clapping as they hit the ground, fifty yards below.

“Almost there,” Paolo said.

He helped to pull me up a ledge, and as I got to my feet, covered in mud, he pointed at another ridge, a few yards away, and said, “Now you see!”

Jutting into the sky was a cracked stone column. I blinked in the rain—in fact, there was not just one but several columns in a row, as in a Greek ruin. There was also a large archway, both sides of it intact, and behind it was a dazzlingly large tower. They looked like what the
bandeirante
had described in 1753.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Stone city.”

“Who built it?”

“It is—how do you say?—an illusion.”

“That?”
I said, pointing to one of the columns.

“It was made by nature, by erosion. But many people who see it think it is a lost city, like Z.”

In 1925, Dr. Rice had seen similarly eroded cliffs, in Roraima, Brazil, and thought they looked like “ruined architecture.”

As we returned to the car and headed north, toward the jungle, Paolo said we would find out soon if Z were such a mirage. We eventually turned onto BR-163, one of the most treacherous roads in South America. Built in 1970 by the Brazilian government in an effort to open up the country’s interior, it extends more than a thousand miles, from Cuiabá to the Amazon River. It was designated on our map as a major highway, but almost all the asphalt from its two lanes had been washed away during the rainy season, leaving behind a combination of ditches and puddle-filled gullies. Our driver sometimes chose to ignore the road altogether and steer along the rocky banks and fields, where herds of cattle occasionally parted in our midst.

As we passed the Manso River, where Fawcett had gotten separated from the rest of the group and where Raleigh had been bitten by ticks, I kept looking out the window, expecting to see the first signs of a fearsome jungle. Instead, the terrain looked like Nebraska—perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. When I asked Taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, “Gone.”

A moment later, he pointed to a fleet of diesel-belching trucks heading in the opposite direction, carrying sixty-foot logs.

“Only the Indians respect the forest,” Paolo said. “The white people cut it all down.” Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover—an area bigger than France. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless animals and plants, many of them with potential medicinal purposes, have vanished. Because the Amazon generates half its own rainfall through moisture that rises into the atmosphere, the devastation has begun to change the region’s ecology, contributing to droughts that destroy the jungle’s ability to sustain itself. And few places have been as ravaged as Mato Grosso, where the state governor, Blairo Maggi, is one of the largest soybean producers in the world. “I don’t feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here,” Maggi told the
New York Times
in 2003. “We’re talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about.”

The latest economic boom, meanwhile, has produced another of the Amazon’s convulsions of violence. The Brazilian Transport Ministry has said that loggers along BR-163 employ “the highest concentration of slave labor in the world.” Indians are frequently driven off their land, enslaved, or murdered. On February 12, 2005, while Paolo and I were making our journey into the jungle, several gunmen, allegedly on the payroll of a rancher in the state of Pará, approached a seventy-three-year-old American nun who defended the rights of Indians. As the men aimed their guns, she removed her Bible and began to read from the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.” The gunmen unloaded six bullets into her, leaving her body facedown in the mud.

James Petersen, the distinguished scientist from the University of Vermont who had trained the archaeologist Michael Heckenberger and had been extremely helpful in planning my trip, told me when we had last
spoken, a few months earlier, that he was excited because he was heading into the Amazon to conduct research near Manaus. “Maybe you can visit me after the Xingu,” he said. That would be wonderful, I responded. But I soon discovered that in August, while he was with the Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Neves at a restaurant in a village along the Amazon River, a pair of bandits, allegedly working for a former police officer, stormed in to rob the place. One of the thieves opened fire, hitting Petersen in the stomach. He fell to the ground and said, “I can’t breathe.” Neves told him he would be okay, but by the time they arrived at a hospital, Petersen had died. He was fifty-one years old.

From BR-163, we veered onto a smaller dirt road, which went east, toward Bakairí Post. We passed close to where Fawcett had stayed with the cattle rancher Galvão, and we decided to see if we could find his manor. In letters, Fawcett had said that the ranch was known as Rio Novo, and that name was marked on several current maps. After nearly four hours of bone-jarring bumps, we came upon a rusty sign at a fork in the road—“Rio Novo”—with an arrow pointing left.

“Look at that,” Paolo said.

We crossed a wobbly, wooden-slatted bridge over a river. The bridge creaked under the weight of the truck, and we looked down at the torrent of water, fifty feet below.

“How many mules and horses did the
coronel
have?” Paolo asked, trying to picture Fawcett’s crossing.

“A dozen or so,” I said. “According to his letters, Galvão replaced some of the weakest animals and gave him a dog . . . which supposedly returned to the farm, several months after Fawcett vanished.”

“It wandered back on its own?” Paolo asked.

“That’s what Galvão said. He also said something about some swallows he saw rise from the forest in the east, which he thought had to be some kind of sign from Fawcett.”

For the first time, we entered a swath of dense forest. Though there was no farm in sight, we came across a mud hut with a thatched roof. Inside
was an old Indian sitting on a tree stump with a wooden cane in his hand. He was barefoot and wore dusty slacks without a shirt. Behind him, hanging on the wall, was the skin of a jaguar and a picture of the Virgin Mary. Taukane asked him, in the Bakairí language, if there was a cattle-breeding ranch known as Rio Novo. The man spit when he heard the name and waved his cane toward the door. “That way,” he said.

Another Indian, who was younger, appeared and said that he would show us the way. We got back in the car and drove down an overgrown path, the branches clapping against the windshield. When we couldn’t drive any farther, our guide hopped out, and we followed him through the forest as he slashed at the creepers and vines with a machete. Several times he paused, studied the tops of the trees, and took a few paces east or west. Finally, he stopped.

We looked around—there was nothing but a cocoon of trees. “Where’s Rio Novo?” Paolo asked.

Our guide lifted his machete over his head and slammed it into the ground. It hit something hard. “Right here,” he said.

We looked down and, to our disbelief, saw a row of cracked bricks.

“This is where the entrance to the manor used to be,” the guide said, adding, “It was very big.”

We began to fan out in the forest, as rain started to fall again, looking for signs of the great Galvão farm.

“Over here!” Paolo cried. He was a hundred feet away, standing by a crumbling brick wall nestled in vines. The farm had been consumed by jungle in just a few decades, and I wondered how actual ancient ruins could possibly survive in such a hostile environment. For the first time, I had some sense of how it might be possible for the remnants of a civilization simply to disappear.

W
HEN WE RETURNED
to the road, the sun had begun to set. In our excitement, we had lost track of the time. We hadn’t eaten since five-thirty
in the morning and had nothing in the truck except a warm bottle of water and some crackers. (Earlier in the trip we had devoured my packets of freeze-dried food, Paolo saying, “Astronauts really eat this stuff?”) As we drove through the night, lightning flashed in the distance, illuminating the emptiness around us. Taukane eventually nodded off, and Paolo and I became engaged in what had become our favorite diversion—trying to imagine what had happened to Fawcett and his party after they left Dead Horse Camp.