famous, but their fantasies remained more those of boys than of men. “We intend to buy motor-cycles and really enjoy a good holiday in Devon, looking up all our friends and visiting the old haunts,” Jack said.
One morning they went with Fawcett to purchase pack animals from a local rancher. Though Fawcett complained that he was “cheated” over everything, he acquired four horses and eight donkeys. “The horses being fairly good, but the mules very ‘fraco' (weak),” Jack said in a letter home, showing off his newest Portuguese word. Jack and Raleigh immediately gave the animals names: an obstinate mule was Gertrude; another, with a bullet-shaped head, was Dumdum; and a third, forlorn-looking animal was Sorehead. Fawcett also obtained a pair of hunting dogs that were, as he put it, “rejoicing in the names of Pastor and Chulim.”
By then, nearly everyone in the remote capital had heard of the famous Englishmen. Some inhabitants regaled Fawcett with legends of hidden cities. One man said that he had recently brought an Indian from the jungle who, upon seeing the churches in Cuiaba, remarked, “This is nothing, in my forest are buildings bigger and loftier by far than this. They have doors and windows of stone. The inside is lit by a great square crystal on a pillar. It shines so brightly as to dazzle the eyes.”
Fawcett was grateful for any visions, however preposterous, that might confirm his own. “I have seen no reason to budge a hair's breadth” from the theory of Z, he wrote Nina.
AROUND THIS TIME, Fawcett heard the first news of Dr. Rice's expedition. For several weeks, there had been no reports of the party, which had been exploring a tributary of the Rio Branco, about twelve hundred miles north of Cuiaba. Many feared that the men had vanished. Then an amateur radio operator in Caterham, England, picked up on his wireless receiver Morse signals coming from deep in the Amazon. The operator jotted down the message:
Progress slow, owing to extremely difficult physical conditions. Personnel expedition numbers over fifty. Unable use hydroplane at present due low water, objects expedition being attained. All well. This message sent by expedition's own wireless. Rice.
Another message reported that Dr. Theodor Koch-Grunberg, the noted anthropologist with the party, had contracted malarial fever and had died. Dr. Rice announced on the wireless that he was about to deploy the hydroplane, although it had to be swept clean of ants and termites and spi-derwebs, which covered the control panel and cockpit like volcanic ash.
The men worried what would happen if they had to land in an emergency. Albert William Stevens, a noted balloonist and the expedition's aerial photographer, told the RGS, “If not over a waterway, parachuting would be advisable before the plane crashed in the massive trees of the forest; the only hope of the flyers would then be to find the wreck of their craft, and secure food. With machete and compass, they could perhaps cut their way to the nearest river, build a raft, and escape. A broken arm or leg would mean certain death, of course.”
Finally, the men filled the tank with fuel-enough for about four hours-and three members of the expedition boarded the plane; the pilot started the propeller, and the machine roared down the river, hurtling into the sky. Stevens described the explorers' first vision of the jungle from five thousand feet up:
The palms below, scattered through the forest, looked like hundreds of star-fish at the bottom of an ocean… Except for the spirals, blankets, and clouds of mist-like emanations ascending from numerous hidden streams of water, there was nothing in sight but the sombre, seemingly endless forest, premonitory in its silence and vastness.
Usually, the pilot and one other member of the party would fly for about three hours each morning, before the rising temperature outside might cause the engine to overheat. Over several weeks, Dr. Rice and his team surveyed thousands of square miles of the Amazon-an amount inconceivable on foot or even by boat. The men discovered, among other things, that the Parima and the Orinoco rivers did not, as had been suspected, share the same source.
Once, the pilot thought he saw something moving between the trees and dived toward the canopy. There was a cluster of “white” Yanomami Indians. When the plane landed, Dr. Rice tried to establish contact, offering the Indians beads and handkerchiefs; unlike on his previous expedition, the tribesmen accepted his overtures. After spending several hours with the tribe, Dr. Rice and his party began leaving the jungle. The RGS asked the Caterham operator to convey “the congratulations and good wishes of the Society.”
The expedition, despite the unfortunate death of Koch-Grunberg, was a historic achievement. In addition to the cartographic discoveries, it had shifted the human vantage point in the Amazon from below the canopy to above, tilting the balance of power that had always favored the jungle over its trespassers. “Those regions where the natives are so hostile or the physical obstacles so great as to effectually bar” entering on foot, Dr. Rice declared, “the airplane passes over easily and quickly.” Moreover, the wireless radio had allowed him to keep in contact with the outside world. (“The Brazilian jungle has ceased to be lonely,” the
To Fawcett, though, there was only one piece of news that mattered: his rival had not found Z.
BOUNDING OUT OF the hotel one April morning, Fawcett felt the blazing sun on his face. The dry season had arrived. After nightfall on April 19, he led Raleigh and Jack through the city, where outlaws carrying Winchester.44 rifles often lingered in the doorways of dimly lit canti nas. Bandits had earlier attacked a group of diamond prospectors staying in the same hotel as Fawcett and his party. “[A prospector] and one of the bandits were killed, and two others seriously wounded,” Jack told his mother. “The police went to work on the case after a few days, and over a cup of coffee asked the murderers why they did it! Nothing more has happened.”
The explorers stopped at the house of John Ahrens, a German diplomat in the region whom they had befriended. Ahrens offered his guests tea and biscuits. Fawcett asked the diplomat if he would relay to Nina and the rest of the world any letters or other news from the expedition that emerged from the jungle. Ahrens indicated that he was pleased to do so, and he later wrote Nina to say that her husband's conversations about Z were so rare and interesting that he had never been happier.
The next morning, under Fawcett's watchful eye, Jack and Raleigh put on their explorer outfits, including lightweight, tear-proof pants and Stetsons. They loaded their.30-caliber rifles and armed themselves with eighteen-inch machetes, which Fawcett had had designed by the best steelmaker in England. A report sent out by NANA was headlined “Unique Outfit for Explorer… Product of Years' Experience in Jungle Research. Weight of Utensils Reduced to Last Ounce.”
Fawcett hired two native porters and guides to accompany the expedition until the more dangerous terrain, about a hundred miles north. On April 20, a crowd gathered to see the party off. At the crack of whips, the caravan jolted forward, Jack and Raleigh as proud as could be. Ahrens accompanied the explorers for about an hour on his own horse. Then, as he told Nina, he watched them march northward “into a world so far completely uncivilised and unknown by people.”
The expedition crossed the
By twilight, they had trekked seven miles, and Fawcett signaled to set up camp. Jack and Raleigh learned that this meant a race, before darkness enveloped them and the mosquitoes devoured their flesh, to string their hammocks, clean their cuts to prevent infections, collect firewood, and secure the pack animals. Dinner was sardines, rice, and biscuits-a feast compared with what they would eat once they had to survive off the land.
That night, as they slept in their hammocks, Raleigh felt something brushing against him. He awoke in a panic, as if he were being attacked by a jaguar, but it was only one of the mules, which had broken free. After he tied it up, he tried to fall asleep again, but before long dawn broke and Fawcett was shouting for everyone to move out, each person wolfing down a bowl of porridge and half a cup of condensed milk, his rations until supper; then the men were off again, racing to keep up with their leader.
Fawcett increased the pace from seven miles a day to ten miles, then to fifteen. One afternoon, as the
