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!”
17
THE WHOLE WORLD IS MAD
Fawcett 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 Ploeg-steert, 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 Gal-lipoli. 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?
That spring, amid intense fighting, Fawcett received a letter from the Royal Geographical Society. It said that, in tribute to his historic mapping of South America, he, too, had been awarded a gold medal. (The Society gave out two gold medals, both equal in prestige: Fawcett's was the Founder's Medal and Dr. Rice's the Patron's.) The award was the same honor that had been bestowed upon the likes of Livingstone and Burton-“the dream of his life,” as Nina put it. Not even the prospect of Dr. Rice's expedition or the continuation of the war could diminish Fawcett's delight. Nina, who told Keltie that such an occasion comes “only once in a life time,” quickly set about planning for the award presentation on May 22. Fawcett obtained leave to attend. “I possess the medal and am content,” he remarked.