Jungle Fever

Percy Harrison Fawcett was the quintessential dashing late-Victorian explorer. Almost too late--he was born in 1867, when the world was starting to run low on terra incognita. Tall, steely and virtually indestructible, he spent much of his life mapping the Amazon basin. In 1925 he set out to find a legendary city he called Z, a glittering oasis of civilization supposedly sequestered deep in the jungle. Whereupon the jungle, having nibbled at him for decades, ate him alive.

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Before he left, Fawcett remarked, "If with all my experience we can't make it, there's not much hope for others." About that much he was right. Dozens of search parties followed him in--Peter Fleming, brother of the writer Ian, was among them--and as many as 100 people died in the hunt. One of the unlikeliest Fawcett hunters, and possibly the last, is David Grann, a 40-year-old journalist who, by his own admission, doesn't even like camping. In 2005 he too entered the Brazilian jungle. Fortunately for him, he came out again. He wrote about his ordeal, and Fawcett's, in The Lost City of Z (Doubleday; 339 pages).

Grann's journey, shadowing Fawcett's, is actually the least interesting part of the book. (For a livelier account of an innocent's adventures in the jungle, look up Redmond O'Hanlon's classic Into the Heart of Borneo.) You never quite get a fix on what Fawcett means to Grann, and you find yourself wishing, uncharitably, that he would narrowly escape death a little more often. What keeps you going is the backstory. The theory that the Amazon basin conceals the capital of an advanced civilization has a long history--it's one of those ideas that's just too romantic to die. As early as the 16th century, the conquistadores were pouring men into the emerald hell to find it. They called the city El Dorado, the Gilded One, because its king supposedly powdered himself with gold dust.

By the time Fawcett went in after Z--as he had cryptically renamed it--the theory had been largely discredited, but he figured that if he hacked through the jungle instead of following rivers, he would find what others had missed. At stake was not just a material fortune but an intellectual victory. Conventional wisdom said that despite all its lush abundance, the Amazon region could never support an evolved, sophisticated human society--it was, in the phrase of one archaeologist, a "counterfeit paradise." Fawcett believed otherwise.

In the years that followed his disappearance, looking for Fawcett practically became a fad. One would-be rescuer, an English movie actor named Albert de Winton, was found by some Indians years later "floating, naked and half-mad, in a canoe." (They promptly killed him.) In 1979, Fawcett's signet ring came to light in a shop in Brazil. The man himself never did.

But the strangest twist in the story may be yet to come. Grann doesn't find Fawcett, but he does meet an American archaeologist who lives, Kurtz-like, with a tribe of Indians deep in the jungle. His work suggests that Z may actually have been more than a figment, and that once upon a time the counterfeit paradise was a real one. Fawcett may have been right after all. But he was too late for that, too.