The Lost City of Z

(“A snake-bite which bleeds is nonpoisonous. Two punctures, plus a bluish and bloodless patch, is a sign of poison.”)

Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind

“of purely unselfish self-sacrifice.”

Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s who is an archaeologist at the University of Illinois, has excavated a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, that was filled with rock paintings-renditions of animal and human figures similar to those that Fawcett had described seeing in various parts of the Amazon and that bolstered his theory of Z. Buried in the cave were remains of a settlement at least ten thousand years old-about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon

Then his right hand developed, as he put it, a “very sick, deep suppurating wound,” which made it “agony” even to pitch his hammock. Then he was stricken with diarrhea. Then he woke up to find what looked like worms in his knee and arm. He peered closer. They were maggots growing inside him. He counted fifty around his elbow alone. “Very painful now and again when they move,” Murray wrote.

skin smelled putrid. His feet swelled. Was he getting elephantiasis, too? “The feet are too big for the boots,” he wrote. “The skin is like pulp

Fawcett’s ability to succeed where so many others failed contributed to a growing myth of his invincibility, which he himself began to believe. How could one explain, he wondered, “standing deliberately in front of savages with whom it was vital to make friends, arrows fixing past one’s head, between one’s legs, even between arm and body, for several minutes, and yet being untouched”? Nina also thought that he was indestructible.

The Maxubis, in particular, showed evidence of a sophisticated culture, he thought. They made exquisite pottery and had names for the planets. “The tribe is also exceedingly musical,” Fawcett noted. Describing their songs, he added, “In the utter silence of the forest, when the first light of day had stilled the nightlong uproar of insect life, these hymns impressed us greatly with their beauty.” It was true, he wrote, that he had encountered some tribes in the jungle that were “intractable, hopelessly brutal,” but others, like the Maxubis, were “brave and intelligent,”

Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar who had traveled throughout the Americas. In a famous debate with Sepúlveda and in a series of treatises, Las Casas tried to prove, once and for all, that Indians were equal humans (“Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls?”), and to condemn those “pretending to be Christians” who “wiped them from the face of the earth.”

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.