25
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 been 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 Kalapa-los' 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 com panions 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 metrop olis 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 Va-juvi 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.