Cummins’s prophecy, Brian Fawcett, who was caring for Nina in Peru, wrote to Joan, “I really don’t think her days on earth will be many!… She herself would be the first to claim she was breaking up.” Once, Nina woke at two in the morning and wrote to Joan that she had a vision that she “must be prepared for ‘the Call’ at any moment.” She thought, “Have you really and truly asked yourself: Have I any fear of Death and the Hereafter?” She hoped her passing would be easy—“perhaps I would go to sleep and not wake up.” Brian told his sister, “In a way it would be a good thing for her to go out here. There would be a rather pleasing thought in her leaving her remains in the same continent as her husband and… son.”
With her health deteriorating, Nina told Brian that she needed to give him something important. She opened a trunk, revealing all of Fawcett’s logbooks and diaries. “The time has come to hand over to you all the documents in my possession,” she said.
Though Brian was only in his late thirties, his life had been scarred by death: not only had he lost his father and brother, but his first wife had died of diabetes when she was seven months pregnant. He had since remarried, yet there were no children, and he suffered spells of what he called “wild, despairing sorrows.”
Brian now looked at his father’s papers, which he described as “the pathetic relics of a disaster whose nature we had no means of knowing.” Over the next several weeks, he carried the papers to work with him. After more than twenty years as a railroad engineer, he was bored and restless. “I feel that I am wasting my life, just going to a lousy office every day, signing a lot of stupid papers, and driving back again!” he confided to Joan. “It leads nowhere.” He went on, “Others can find immortality in their children. That is denied me, and I want to seek it.”
During his lunch break, he would read through his father’s papers, picturing Fawcett “on his expeditions, sharing with him the hardships, seeing through his eyes the great objective.” Resentful about not being chosen for the expedition, Brian had once professed little interest in his father’s work. Now he was consumed by it. He decided to quit his job and stitch together the fragmentary writings into
The book, published in 1953, became an international sensation and was praised by Graham Greene and Harold Nicolson. Not long after, Nina died, at the age of eighty-four. Brian and Joan had no longer been able to care for her, and she had been staying in a run-down boardinghouse in Brighton, England, demented and virtually penniless. As one observer noted, she had “sacrificed” her life to her husband and his memory.
In the early 1950s, Brian decided to conduct his own expeditions in search of the missing explorers. He suspected that his father, who would be approaching ninety, was dead and that Raleigh, owing to his infirmities, had perished soon after leaving Dead Horse Camp. But Jack-he was the cause of Brian’s gnawing doubt. What if he had survived? After all, Jack was strong and young when the party had disappeared. Brian sent a letter to the British Embassy in Brazil, asking for help in securing permission to carry out a search effort. He explained that no one had legally presumed his brother dead and that he could not do so “without satisfying myself that all has been done.” Moreover, such a mission might bring about the “return to his own country of one who has been lost for thirty years.” British officials thought Brian “just as mad as his father,” as one diplomat put it in a private communique, and refused to facilitate his “suicide.”
Still, Brian forged ahead with his plans and boarded a ship to Brazil; his arrival there touched off a media storm. “Briton to Hunt Dad, Brother Lost in Jungle,” the
Brian told his sister that he was becoming an explorer in spite of himself, but he knew that he would never survive trekking in the wilderness. Instead, relying on the means that Dr. Rice had pioneered decades earlier and that were now more affordable, he rented a tiny propeller plane and, with a pilot, canvassed the jungle from the air. He dropped thousands of leaflets that fluttered over the trees like snow. The leaflets asked, “Are you Jack Fawcett? If your answer is yes, then make this sign holding arms above your head… Can you control the Indians if we land?”
He never received a response or found any evidence of Jack. But on another expedition he looked for the object of his brother and father’s quest: the City of Z. “Fate must surely have guided my steps along this path for a purpose,” Brian wrote. Peering through binoculars, he spied on a distant ridge a crumbling city with streets and towers and pyramids. “That looks like it!” the pilot shouted. But, as the plane got closer, they realized that it was simply an outcropping of freakishly eroded sandstone. “The illusion was remarkable-almost unbelievable,” Brian said. And, as the days wore on, he began to fear what he had never allowed himself to consider-that there had never been a Z. As he later wrote, “The whole romantic structure of fallacious beliefs, already rocking dangerously, collapsed about me, leaving me dazed.” Brian started questioning some of the strange papers that he had found among his father’s collection, and never divulged. Originally, Fawcett had described Z in strictly scientific terms and with caution: “I do not assume that ‘The City’ is either large or rich.” But by 1924 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into “the cradle of all civilizations” and the center of one of Blavatsky’s “White Lodges,” where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to direct the fate of the universe. Fawcett hoped to discover a White Lodge that had been there since “the time of Atlantis,” and to attain transcendence. Brian wrote in his diary, “Was Daddy’s whole conception of ‘Z,’ a spiritual objective, and the manner of reaching it a religious allegory?” Was it possible that three lives had been lost for “an objective that had never existed”? Fawcett himself had scribbled in a letter to a friend, “Those whom the Gods intend to destroy they first make mad!”
25. Z
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 Garcas, 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
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
