The Lost City of Z

scientists formed the Society for Psychical Research. Members soon included a prime minister and Nobel Prize laureates, as well as Alfred Tennyson, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who, along with Darwin, developed the theory of evolution. Conan Doyle, who in Sherlock Holmes had created the embodiment of the rationalist mind, spent years trying to confirm the existence of fairies and sprites. “I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if anybody is, and I say that the case for spiritualism is absolutely proved,” Conan Doyle once declared.

While Madame Blavatsky continued to practice the arts of a medium, she gradually turned her attention to more ambitious psychic frontiers. Claiming that she was a conduit for a brotherhood of reincarnated Tibetan mahatmas, she tried to give birth to a new religion called Theosophy, or “wisdom of the gods.” It drew heavily on occult teachings and Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, and for many Westerners it came to repre sent a kind of counterculture, replete with vegetarianism. As the historian Janet Oppenheim noted in The Other World, “For those who wanted to rebel dramatically against the constraints of the Victorian ethos- however they perceived that elusive entity-the flavor of heresy must have been par ticularly alluring when concocted by so unabashed an outsider as H. P. Blavatsky.”

Some Theosophists, taking their heresy even further, became Buddhists and aligned themselves with religious leaders in India and Ceylon who opposed colonial rule. Among these Theosophists was Fawcett’s older brother, Edward, to whom Percy had always looked up. A hulking mountain climber who wore a gold monocle, Edward, who had been a child prodigy and published an epic poem at the age of thirteen, helped Blavatsky research and write her 1893 magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. In 1890, he traveled to Ceylon, where Percy was stationed, to take the Pansil, or five precepts of Buddhism, which includes vows not to kill, drink liquor, or commit adultery. An Indian newspaper carried an account of the ceremony under the headline “Conversion of an Englishman to Buddhism”:

The ceremony commenced at about 8:30 p.m., in the sanctum sanctorum of the Buddhist Hall, where the High Priest Sumangala examined the candidate. Satisfied with the views of Mr. Fawcett, the High Priest… said that it gave him the greatest pleasure to in troduce Mr. Fawcett, an educated Englishman… Mr. Fawcett then stood up and begged the High Priest to give him the “Pansil.” The High Priest assented, and the “Pansil” was given, Mr. Fawcett repeating it after the High Priest. At the last line of the “Five Precepts” the English Buddhist was cheered vociferously by his co-religionists present.

On another occasion, according to family members, Percy Fawcett, apparently inspired by his brother, took the Pansil as well-an act that, for a colonial military officer who was supposed to be suppressing Buddhists and promoting Christianity on the island, was more seditious. In The Victorians, the British novelist and historian A. N. Wilson noted, “At the very time in history when the white races were imposing Imperialism on Egypt and Asia, there is something gloriously subversive about those Westerners who succumbed to the Wisdom of the East, in however garbled or preposterous a form.” Other scholars point out that nineteenth and early twentieth century Europeans-even the most benignly motivated-exoticized the East, which only helped to legitimize imperialism. At least in Fawcett’s mind, what he had been taught his whole life about the superiority of Western civilization clashed with what he experienced beyond its shores. “I transgressed again and again the awful laws of traditional behavior, but in doing so learned a great deal,” he said. Over the years, his attempt to reconcile these opposing forces, to balance his moral absolutism and cultural relativism, would force him into bizarre contradictions and greater heresies.

Now, though, the tension merely fueled his fascination with explorers like Richard Francis Burton and David Livingstone, who had been esteemed by Victorian society, even worshipped by it, and yet were able to live outside it. Fawcett devoured accounts of their adventures in the penny presses, which were being churned out by new steam-powered printing machines. In 1853, Burton, disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, had managed to sneak into Mecca. Four years later, in the race to find the source of the Nile, John Speke had gone nearly blind from an infection and almost deaf from stabbing a beetle that was boring into his ear canal. In the late 1860s, the missionary David Livingstone, also searching for the Nile’s source, vanished into the heart of Africa, and in January 1871, Henry Morton Stanley set out to find him, vowing, “No living man… shall stop me. Only death can prevent me.” Incredibly, ten months later, Stanley succeeded, famously greeting him, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Livingstone, intent on continuing his search, refused to return with him.

Suffering from a clot in his artery, disoriented, bleeding internally, and hungry, he died in northeast Zambia in 1873; in his last moments, he had been kneeling in prayer. His heart, as he requested, was buried there, while the rest of his body was carried by his followers across the continent, borne aloft as if he were a saint, and transported back to England, where throngs of people paid tribute to him at Westminster Abbey.

Fawcett later became friendly with the novelist who most vividly conjured up this world of the Victorian adventurer-savant: Sir Henry Rider Haggard. In 1885, Haggard published King Solomon’s Mines, which was advertised as “THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN.” Like many quest novels, it was patterned on folktales and myths, such as that of the Holy Grail. The hero is the iconic Allan Quatermain, a no-nonsense elephant hunter who searches for a hidden cache of diamonds in Africa with a map traced in blood. V. S. Pritchett noted that, whereas “E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the unconscious,” Haggard “installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public’s secret desires.”

Yet Fawcett did not have to look so far to see his desires spilled on the page. After abandoning Theosophy, Fawcett’s older brother, Edward, remade himself into a popular adventure novelist who for a time was hailed as the English answer to Jules Verne. In 1894, he published Swallowed by an Earthquake, which tells the story of a group of friends who are plunged into a subterranean world where they discover dinosaurs and a tribe of “wild-man that eats men.”

It was Edward’s next novel, however, that most acutely reflected his younger brother’s private fantasies-and, in many ways, chillingly foretold Percy’s future. Called The Secret of the Desert and published in 1895, the novel appeared with a blood-red cover that was engraved with a picture of an explorer wearing a pith helmet who was dangling from a rope over a palace wall. The tale centers on an amateur cartographer and archaeologist named Arthur Manners-the very personification of the Victorian sensibility. With funding from a scientific body, Manners, the “most venturesome of travellers,” abandons the quaint British countryside to explore the perilous region of central Arabia. Insisting on going alone (“possibly thinking that it would be just as well to enjoy what celebrity might be in store for him unshared”), Manners wanders into the depths of the Great Red Desert in search of unknown tribes and archaeological ruins. After two years elapse without any word from him, many in England fear that he has starved or been taken hostage by a tribe. Three of Manners’s colleagues launch a rescue mission, using an armor-plated vehicle that one of them has constructed-a futuristic contraption that, like Verne’s submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, reflects both the progress and the terrifying capabilities of European civilization. The expedition picks up reports that Manners headed in the direction of the fabled Oasis of Gazelles, which is said to contain “strange ruins, relics of some race once no doubt of great renown, but now wholly forgotten.” Anyone who has attempted to reach it has either vanished or been killed. As Manners’s friends make toward it, they run out of water and fear that “we would-be rescuers are ourselves lost men.” Then they spot a shimmering pool-the Oasis of Gazelles. And beside it are the ruins of a temple laden with treasure. “I was overcome with admiration for the forgotten race that had reared this astounding fabric,” the narrator says.

The explorers discover that Manners is being held prisoner inside the temple and spirit him away in the high- speed tank. Without time to bring any artifacts to prove to the world their discovery, they must rely on Manners to persuade the “skeptics.” But a member of the expedition, planning to return and excavate the ruins before anyone else, says of Manners, “He won’t, I hope, be very particular about mentioning the exact latitude and longitude.”

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ONE DAY FAWCETT set out from Fort Frederick, trekking inland through a morass of vines and brambles. “Everywhere about me there was sound-the sound of the wild,” he wrote of Ceylon’s jungle. After hours, he came upon what he was looking for: a half-buried wall carved with hundreds of images of elephants. It was a remnant of an ancient temple, and all around it Fawcett could see adjoining ruins: stone pillars and palace archways and dagobas. They were part of Anuradhapura, a city that had been built more than two thousand years earlier. Now, as a contemporary of Fawcett’s put it, “the city has vanished like a dream… Where are the hands which reared it, the men who sought its shelter in the burning heat of noon?” Later, Fawcett wrote a friend that the “old Ceylon is buried under forest and mould… There are bricks and vanishing dagobas and inexplicable mounds, pits, and