Lost City of the Sun

4

THE HIGHWAYS AND HOURS stretched on, the scenery more of the same. They found a small town café for lunch, then continued on. An hour north of Vera, now on Highway 422, Skip found the turnoff he was looking for. Crossing the Rio Sao Francisco basin, the pavement soon ended and they negotiated a network of dirt roads, first southeast, then working back to the north, around the edges of fields and farms. The roads grew increasingly rough and narrow until they finally petered out close to the river. Skip parked the SUV and they climbed out, stretching and donning hats against the tropical sun. Nusiri tucked her short ponytail into her beige baseball cap, emblazoned with the roadrunner logo of Zane's soccer team. Zane plopped on a floppy boonie hat. Skip wore an outback-style Stetson, not unlike the one worn by Percy Fawcett.

Skip worked out the kinks in his back and legs as they walked the hundred or so yards in, following a worn path through scattered trees and bushes. "You know, we could have driven here in a fraction of the time if we'd flown into Sinop instead of Cuiaba. But I needed to see the whole route that Fawcett took, no matter how it's changed, to get an appreciation of what he went through. Sinop didn't even exist in his day. It wasn't founded until 1974."

He swatted at a swarm of gnats that flitted in front of his face, then continued. "Imagine traveling all that distance on foot and muleback. And that was after months of travel by ship and train and river boat to even get to Cuiaba in the first place. They couldn't just fly in like we did. The land was mostly jungle and scrub brush. They were plagued by mosquitoes and gnats and ticks. Raleigh Rimell's feet were so infected from tick bites, so swollen and ulcerated, with skin oozing and peeling off, that Fawcett was worried he wouldn't be able to make it. Still, he bravely pressed on. They lost their way, then found it again, a few times, and rested up at a friend's ranch, a man by the name of Hermenegildo Galvao."

They had arrived at a small clearing. The sounds of insects and birds filled the air, along with the trickle of water from the Rio Sao Francisco, just beyond the next line of trees. "Finally, after much difficulty, they made it here, right here where we stand," Skip concluded, "on May 20th, 1925, just about a week after Jack Fawcett's twenty-second birthday. They camped here for a few days, dismissing a couple of local porters who had traveled with them to this point. Fawcett sent with them his final letter. The last words he wrote were, 'You need have no fear of any failure.' On May 29th, Percy Fawcett, Jack Fawcett, and Raleigh Rimell left with eight mules into the unknown wilds of the Matto Grosso. They were never heard from again."

After setting up a simple overnight campsite, Skip wandered around for a bit, absorbing the atmosphere and feeling of this place. For him it was personal. Five years after Fawcett, Skip's grandfather had been here, on his own search. He'd been one of the lucky ones. He'd come back out of the jungle alive. Many who searched did not. Skip took out that quipu that his grandfather had found and breathed in of the dank air, rich with the smells of vegetation, damp earth, and slow-moving water. The quipu apparently made by Jack Fawcett himself. Left behind as a clue? A clue to what? Skip studied the trees all around, his eyes coming to rest on the largest rubber tree, at the edge of the clearing, its massive buttressed roots reaching for the river. Other than its size, there was nothing else remarkable about it, to differentiate it from its neighbors. There were many gray stains of sap over the pale bark, from many wounds ever the years. There was no way to tell. What had he been hoping to find? Yellow feathers, faded with age, and the remains of an old blowpipe dart, still stuck there? That would have been gone long ago, rotted away, or even buried in the tree itself as it grew over and around the foreign object embedded in its bark. Skip shook his head and, tucking the quipu back inside his shirt, ambled over to where Nusiri was preparing a simple dinner.

"Dad! Bones!"

Skip turned aside and walked over to see what Zane had found.

Instead of Percy Fawcett's horse, he found the remains of a cow, who must have wandered off from a nearby ranch and never made it back.

"Great. Now we can call this place Dead Cow Camp. C'mon, let's see what's for dinner."

After the meal and an easy cleanup, Skip took out his phone. "So, let's have a look at the maps and stuff and see where we stand and what we have to work with."

For the sake of convenience, Skip kept most of the information he needed on his phone, in the form of files and pictures and screenshots, that he could access offline, in cases like this with no internet or cell reception. He had maps, shots of satellite photos, a copy of Manuscript 512, and a Kindle library full of reference books and materials. He also had Word files for notes and the working draft of his article, which would link with and update on his laptop once he established a connection. To keep it all running, among the few modern improvements he'd made to Lucille was the installation of a USB port for charging. He'd only just recently changed out the original artificial horizon for a color display attitude indicator. He'd done that for Zane's sake as he was learning to fly.

"Okay, so we know that Fawcett's main objective was his Lost City of Z, which he thought was somewhere way over here, between the Tocantins River and the Rio Sao Francisco, over in Bahia State, not the creek by the same name behind us here. So from here, he planned to go a bit north, then cut east across the basins of the Xingu and Tocantins, to somewhere about here." He zoomed in on the image in his copy of Brian Fawcett's book Exploration Fawcett that showed the explorer's proposed route, as well as his previous expeditions.

"Why did he call the city Z?" asked Zane.

"He was convinced that there was one more ancient civilization in the Americas yet to be discovered. Since he would be the one to discover this last great city, he coded it Z, the last letter of the alphabet."

Skip tapped the book to one of the last chapters and scrolled through a few pages until he found the references he was looking for. "Now there were also a couple of other things Fawcett wanted to check out while he was in the area, either on the way out or on the way back. One was an upright rock near a big waterfall on the Rio Paranatinga with ancient inscriptions and drawings that sound like petroglyphs. That might be a stele, like the Maya used. That would be to the west of here. And there was the tale he heard of a tower of stone, midway to Z, from which mysterious lights could be seen. To the east, of course.

"And then there is what he referred to as the 1753 city, the one that inspired the idea of Z in the first place, what we now know as Manuscript 512, after its archive designation in the Brazilian National Library. It was a city said to be built of stone, with wide streets and houses with columns in the architecture of ancient Greece. Fawcett thought of it as to the east of Z, in Bahia, according to clues he thought he read in the manuscript, but on his journey, he met locals who described such a city to the north."

"East, west, north," said Nusiri. "No wonder it is a mystery where he may have gone from here."

"On top of which, he was known for sending back misleading information at times, to discourage others from following him, or searching if he did indeed fail to return."

"And we've seen over the years how that turned out."

"For instance, the coordinates for Dead Horse Camp that he sent back to NANA, the North American Newspaper Alliance, that he'd sold the newspaper rights to, differ slightly from what Brian Fawcett has told us." Skip held up the quipu. "The numbers coded here match what Brian published years later. And of course, when you try to cross reference hand drawn maps in books with modern maps and satellite images, things don't always jive. Which leaves quite a dilemma."

He held out the quipu again. "Fortunately, Jack Fawcett apparently left behind a clue that my grandfather was lucky enough to find, and has found its way to those who can translate it and appreciate its meaning. We now have another set of coordinates that will lead us...where? There's only one way to find out." He tapped his phone a few times and called up a screenshot of a satellite image. "That's located about here, to the north of where we are now, in Para State, where there are indigenous preserves, where the rainforest is still intact, where there is still wilderness, and where there are mysteries to be solved."

Skip tucked the quipu back into his shirt and slipped his phone back into his pocket. "We'll do a flyover first, see what it looks like close up, see if there's a place to land and a way to get in on foot. No idea how or why they may have ended up there, but if they did, we're sure gonna give it our best shot to find out."