The Lost City of Z

Candice Millard explained in The River of Doubt, “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one

In 1872, Bolivia and Brazil had attempted to build a railroad through the jungle, but so many workers died from disease and from Indian attacks that the project became known as the Railroad of the Dead. It was said that one man died per tie.

But Fawcett, consulting archival records and interviewing tribesmen, had calculated that a monumental city, along with possibly even remnants of its population, was in the jungle surrounding the Xingu River in the Brazilian Mato Grosso. In keeping with his secretive nature, he gave the city a cryptic and alluring name, one that, in all his writings

While most of my articles seem unrelated, they typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things—things that most of us would never dare—who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.

Even as late as 1740, it was estimated that fewer than a hundred and twenty places on the planet had been accurately mapped. Because precise portable clocks did not exist, navigators had no means of determining longitude, which is most easily measured as a function of time.

Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, instead, disappeared along with him in the forests that travelers had long ago christened the “green hell.”

Even today, the Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty Indian tribes that have never been contacted by outsiders. “These forests are . . . almost the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind,”

Since he had left England for Ceylon fourteen years earlier, London seemed to have become more crowded, more dirty, more modern, more rich, more poor, more everything.

The air smelled of blood and fumes. Trenches became bogs of urine and excrement and bones and lice and maggots and rats. The walls caved in from rain, and occasionally men drowned in the slime. One soldier sank slowly for days in a mud hole, without anyone being able to reach him. Fawcett, who had always found refuge in the natural world, no longer