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.
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!”
Z
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 b
een 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?”
I looked up at the canopy. “Somewhere in the Xingu.”
“Are you okay?”
“A little sick, but I’m okay. I miss you.”
“Zachary wants to say something to you.”
A moment later I could hear my son babbling. “Zachary, it’s Daddy,” I said.
“Dada,” he said.
“Yes, Dada.”
“He’s started calling the phone Dada,” my wife said, taking back the receiver. “When are you coming home?”
“Soon.”
“It hasn’t been easy.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” As I was talking, I heard someone approaching. “I gotta go,” I said suddenly.
“What’s going on?”
“Someone’s coming.”
Before she could reply, I hung up the phone and slipped it back in the bag. In the same moment, a young Indian appeared, and I followed him back to the village. That night, as I lay in my hammock, I thought about what Brian Fawcett had said of his second wife after his expedition. “I was all she had,” he noted. “And this situation need not have arisen. I chose it deliberately—selfishly—forgetting what it might mean to her in my eagerness to pursue an idea to its end.”
I knew that by then I had enough material to write a story. I had found out about the bones of Vajuvi’s grandfather. I had heard the Kalapalos’ oral history. I had reconstructed Fawcett’s youth and training at the RGS and his last expedition. Yet there were gaps in the narrative that still haunted me. I had often heard about biographers who became consumed by their subjects, who, after years of investigating their lives, of trying to follow their every step and inhabit their world completely, were driven into fits of rage and despair, because, at some level, the people were unknowable. Aspects of their characters, parts of their stories, remained impenetrable. I wondered what had happened to Fawcett and his companions after the Kalapalos saw their campfire go out. I wondered if the explorers had been killed by Indians and, if so, which ones. I wondered if Jack had reached a point when he began to question his father, and whether Fawcett himself, perhaps seeing his son dying, had asked, “What have I done?” And I wondered, most of all, whether there really was a Z. Was it, as Brian Fawcett feared, just a concoction of his father’s imagination, or perhaps of all our imaginations? The finished story of Fawcett seemed to reside eternally beyond the horizon: a hidden metropolis of words and paragraphs, my own Z. As Cummins, channeling Fawcett, put it, “My story is lost. But it is a human soul’s vanity to endeavor to disinter it and convey it to the world.”
The logical thing was to let go and return home. But there was one last person, I thought, who might know something more: Michael Heckenberger, the archaeologist from the University of Florida whom James Petersen had recommended I get in touch with. During our brief phone conversation, Heckenberger had told me that he would be willing to meet me in the Kuikuro village, which was north of the Kalapalo settlement. I had heard rumors from other anthropologists that Heckenberger had spent so much time in the Xingu that he had been adopted by the Kuikuro chief and had his own hut in the village. If anyone might have picked up some fragmentary evidence or legend regarding Fawcett’s final days, it would be him. And so I decided to press on, even though Brian Fawcett had warned others to stop “throwing away their lives for a mirage.”
When I told Paolo, he gave me a quizzical look—it meant heading to the very place where James Lynch and his men had been kidnapped in 1996. Perhaps out of duty or resignation, Paolo said, “As you wish,” and began to load our equipment in the Kalapalos’ aluminum canoe. With Vajuvi serving as our guide, we set out along the Kuluene River. It had rained most of the night before, and the river spilled into the surrounding forest. Usually, Paolo and I talked animatedly about our quest, but now we simply sat in silence.
After several hours, the boat approached an embankment where a young Indian boy was fishing. Vajuvi steered the boat toward him and turned off the engine as the bow slid onto the shore.
“Are we here?” I asked Vajuvi.
“The village is inland,” he said. “You’ll have to walk from here.”
Paolo and I unloaded our bags and our boxes of food, and said goodbye to Vajuvi. We watched as his boat disappeared behind a bend in the river. There was too much baggage for us to carry, and Paolo asked the boy if he could borrow his bicycle, which was propped against a tree. The boy agreed, and Paolo told me to wait while he went to find help. As he rode away, I sat under a buriti tree and observed the boy casting his line and pulling it in.
An hour passed without anyone from the village appearing. I stood and stared down the path—there was only a trail of mud surrounded by wild grass and bushes. It was past noon when four boys showed up on bicycles. They strapped the cargo on the backs of their bicycles, but they had no room for a large cardboard box, which weighed about forty pounds, or for my computer bag, and so I carried them myself. In a mixture of Portuguese, Kuikuro, and pantomime, the boys explained that they would meet me in the village, waved goodbye, and vanished down the path on their rickety bikes.
With the box resting on one shoulder and the bag in my hand, I followed on foot, alone. The path wound through a partially submerged mangrove forest. I wondered whether I should remove my shoes, but I had no place to carry them, so I left them on, my ankles sinking in the mud. The vestiges of the path soon disappeared underwater. I was unsure which way to go, and I veered to the right, where I thought I saw some trampled grass. I walked for an hour, and there was still no sight of anyone. The box on my shoulder had grown heavier, as had the bag for my laptop, which, among the mangroves, seemed like an absurdity of modern travel. I thought about leaving them behind, but there was no dry spot to be found.
Occasionally, I slipped in the mud, falling to my knees in the water. Thorny reeds tore the skin on my arms and legs, causing trickles of blood. I yelled out Paolo’s name, but there was no response. Exhausted, I found a grassy knoll that was only a few inches below the waterline, and sat down. My pants filled with water as I listened to the frogs. The sun burned my face and hands, and I wiped muddy water on myself in a vain attempt to cool down. It was then that I removed from my pocket the map of the Xingu on which Paolo and I h
ad sketched our route. The Z in the middle suddenly seemed ludicrous, and I began to curse Fawcett. I cursed him for Jack and Raleigh. I cursed him for Murray and Rattin and Winton. And I cursed him for myself.
After a while, I stood again and tried to find the correct path. I walked and walked; in one spot, the water rose to my waist, and I lifted the bag and the box onto my head. Each time I thought that I had reached the end of the mangrove forest, a new swath opened up before me—large patches of tall, damp reeds clouded with piums and mosquitoes, which ate into me.
I was slapping a mosquito on my neck when I heard a noise in the distance. I stopped but didn’t see anything. As I took another step, the noise grew louder. I called out once more for Paolo.
Then I heard it again—a strange cackle, almost like laughter. A dark object darted in the tall grass, and another, and another. They were coming closer. “Who’s there?” I asked in Portuguese.
Another sound reverberated behind me and I spun around: the grass was rustling, even though there was no wind. I walked faster, stumbling, trying to push through the reeds. The water deepened and widened until it resembled a lake. I was looking dumbfounded at the shore, some two hundred yards ahead, when I noticed, tucked in a bush, an aluminum canoe. Though there was no paddle, I rested the box and my bag in it and climbed in, short of breath. Then I heard the noise again and bolted upright. Out of the tall reeds burst dozens of naked children. They seized the edges of the canoe and began to swim me across the lake, screaming with laughter the entire way. When we reached the shore again, I stumbled out of the canoe, and the children followed me up a path. We had reached the Kuikuro village.