Copyright © 2009 by David Grann.
highlight my route now faded. I stared at my markings, hoping that they might lead me
out of the Amazon, rather than deeper into it.
The letter Z was still visible in the center of the map. Yet it seemed less like a signpost
than like a taunt, another testament to my folly.
I had always considered myself a disinterested reporter who did not get involved
personally in his stories. While others often seemed to succumb to their mad dreams and
obsessions, I tried to be the invisible witness. And I had convinced myself that that was
why I had traveled more than ten thousand miles, from New York to London to the
Xingu River, one of the longest tributaries of the Amazon, why I had spent months
poring over hundreds of pages of Victorian diaries and letters, and why I had left behind
my wife and one-year-old son and taken out an extra insurance policy on my life.
I told myself that I had come simply to record how generations of scientists and
adventurers became fatally obsessed with solving what has often been described as “the
greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century” — the whereabouts of the lost City
of Z. The ancient city, with its network of roads and bridges and temples, was believed to
be hidden in the Amazon, the largest jungle in the world. In an age of airplanes and
satellites, the area remains one of the last blank spaces on the map. For hundreds of years,
it has haunted geographers, archaeologists, empire builders, treasure hunters, and philosophers. When Europeans first arrived in South America, around the turn of the
sixteenth century, they were convinced that the jungle contained the glittering kingdom
of El Dorado. Thousands died looking for it. In more recent times, many scientists have
concluded that no complex civilization could have emerged in so hostile an environment,
where the soil is agriculturally poor, mosquitoes carry lethal diseases, and predators lurk
in the forest canopy.
The region has generally been regarded as a primeval wilderness, a place in which there
are, as Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature, “no Arts; no Letters; no Society;
and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death.” The Amazon’s
merciless conditions have fueled one of the most enduring theories of human
development: environmental determinism. According to this theory, even if some early
humans eked out an existence in the harshest conditions on the planet, they rarely
advanced beyond a few primitive tribes. Society, in other words, is a captive of
geography. And so if Z was found in such a seemingly uninhabitable environment it
would be more than a repository of golden treasure, more than an intellectual curiosity; it
would, as one newspaper declared in 1925, “write a new chapter of human history.”
For nearly a century, explorers have sacrificed everything, even their lives, to find the
City of Z. The search for the civilization, and for the countless men who vanished while
looking for it, has eclipsed the Victorian quest novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and H.
Rider Haggard — both of whom, as it happens, were drawn into the real-life hunt for Z.
At times, I had to remind myself that everything in this story is true: a movie star really
was abducted by Indians; there were cannibals, ruins, secret maps, and spies; explorers
died from starvation, disease, attacks by wild animals, and poisonous arrows; and at stake
amid the adventure and death was the very understanding of the Americas before
Christopher Columbus came ashore in the New World.
Now, as I examined my creased map, none of that mattered. I looked up at the tangle of
trees and creepers around me, and at the biting flies and mosquitoes that left streaks of
blood on my skin. I had lost my guide. I was out of food and water. Putting the map back in my pocket, I pressed forward, trying to find my way out, as branches snapped in my
face. Then I saw something moving in the trees. “Who’s there?” I called. There was no
reply. A figure flitted among the branches, and then another. They were coming closer,
and for the first time I asked myself, What the hell am I doing here?
