Fawcett of the Mato Grosso

LOST TRAILS, LOST CITIES (332 pp.)--Colonel P. H. Fawcett--Funk & Wag-nails ($5).

On May 30, 1925, the green wave of Brazil's Mato Grosso Plateau closed for the last time over the head of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the famed British explorer. What happened to him then? One guess is as good as another, and the Sunday supplements have made them all. Was he killed by a wild animal? No evidence of that. Is he still held captive in the deep interior by Indians who believe him a god? So one old Indian woman declared a score of years ago. Or was he really murdered by the Kalapalos chieftain who confessed the crime (TIME, April 16, 1951)? The bones said to be Fawcett's were later proved to be those of another man. Then could Fawcett possibly have reached the mysterious lost city of "Z," the mother remnant of the pre-Andean civilization, which he was certain still stood in the darkest midmost of Brazil?

Last week, after seven expeditions and almost three decades of search for the famous adventurer and his party, the trail was cold, but the subject of Fawcett was not. Conceding at last that all hope of the colonel's return was gone, the Fawcett family has released for publication the memoir of his seven expeditions through the South American rain forest. It ranks as one of the major narratives in modern exploration.

Wisdom of Savages. Colonel Percy Fawcett first came to South America as a surveyor for the Bolivian government. Even then, at age 39, he was a stern, solitary man with childlike eyes and a mystical longing for primitive things. He found them: crocodiles everywhere, spiders that can catch birds, anacondas more than 60 ft. long that wail disturbingly in the jungle night, bloodsucking cockroaches, 2-in. biting ants, hordes of vampire bats, rivers full of stingrays, electric eels and shoals of tiny, man-eating piranha.

What the visible enemies left of a man, the invisible ones were ready to attack. Influenza, tertian fever, leprosy were all endemic, along with tapeworm and a mysterious intestinal infestation that made its victim long to eat earth.

Fawcett arrived in 1906, toward the end of the great rubber boom, when "every ton of rubber gathered cost a human life." One economical German farmer personally murdered more than 40 Indian slaves in a batch, simply because they were too sick to work. When the Indians murdered a white man, his brother set out some tins of poisoned alcohol in a jungle clearing for bait, and the next day surveyed his catch: 80 dead Indians. Fawcett knew of a sick Englishman who, because he lay still, was assumed by the Indians to be dead; having got this idea in their heads, they decided that his groans were those of his spirit, and buried him alive.

To the Indians, death seemed to be a laughing matter. They would roar with glee when their best friends came down with beriberi or were snapped out of dugouts by the giant anacondas. Everybody, Indian or white, drank incredible quantities of cachac,a, the local cane liquor, ate maggoty rice and dried meat, and sank deeper into debt.

Only the "savages." the forest Indians, remained human. Fawcett came to love their primeval sweetness and wisdom. They track their game by scent. Fawcett recorded, as an animal does, and call it to be killed with strange, alluring cries that the creature cannot resist. They fish by lacing the water with a caustic sap called soliman, that stuns the fish but does not poison their flesh. Fawcett also solemnly accepted the story that the Indians know of a plant whose juices dissolve metal, and even make stone soft and workable.

The Jungle Grail. Fawcett rarely fell sick, never caught a serious disease. He had a close brush with a jaguar, but never, so far as he records, was bitten by a snake. Though often shot at, Fawcett was never hit by the 6-ft. poisoned arrows of the forest people; and once, when he and his mule fell off a log bridge into a rushing stream, he escaped, almost miraculously, without a scratch.

From 1909, when he quit the British army, until his disappearance. Fawcett was eyelocked to a visionary goal: the discovery of the legendary city he called "Z." Stories of such a city are cherished by many Indian tribes, and there are also a few old travelers' tales which have some claim to be taken seriously. Most interesting to Fawcett was the account of a Portuguese (his name has been lost) who said that in 1753, after ten years of travels in the Amazonian wilds, he discovered a massive stone city of the sort built in Peru before the Spaniards came. Fawcett himself claimed that, on his next-to-last expedition, he had discovered an outpost of the city.

In such odd lights and glimmerings, Explorer Fawcett conceived his grail and followed it.

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