The Lost City of Z Read Online Free Page B

competition. For months, the two men studied satellite images of the Amazon, honing their trajectory. Lynch obtained the best equipment: turbocharged jeeps with puncture-resistant tires, walkie-talkies, shortwave radios, and generators. Like Fawcett, Lynch had experience designing boats, and with a shipbuilder he constructed two twenty-five-foot aluminum vessels that would be shallow enough to pass through swamps. He also put together a medical kit that contained dozens of antidotes for snake poisons.
    He chose his party with equal care. He recruited two mechanics, who could repair all the equipment, and two veteran off-road drivers. He also enlisted Dr. Daniel Muñoz, an acclaimed forensic anthropologist who, in 1985, had helped to identify the remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi fugitive, and who could help confirm the origins of any object they might find from Fawcett’s party: a belt buckle, a bone fragment, a bullet.
    Although Fawcett had warned that large expeditions have “only one and all come to grief,” the party soon grew to include sixteen men. Still,there was one more person who wanted to go: Lynch’s sixteen-year-old son, James, Jr. Athletic and more muscular than his father, with bushy brown hair and large brown eyes, he had gone on a previous expedition and acquitted himself well. And so Lynch agreed, like Fawcett, to take his son with him.
    The team assembled in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso, along the southern edge of the Amazon basin. Lynch handed out T-shirts that he had made up with a picture of footprints leading into the jungle. In England, the
Daily Mail
published a story about the expedition under the headline “Are We About to Solve the Enduring Mystery of Colonel Percy Fawcett?” For days, the group drove through the Amazon basin, traversing unpaved roads scarred with ruts and brambles. The forest grew thicker, and James, Jr., pressed his face against the window. Wiping steam from the glass, he could see the leafy crowns of trees unfurling overhead, before breaking apart, as shafts of sunlight poured into the forest, the yellow wings of butterflies and macaws suddenly visible. Once, he spotted a six-foot snake, half-burrowed in mud, with a deep depression between its eyes.
“Jararaca”
his father said. It was a pit viper, one of the most venomous snakes in the Americas.
(A jararaca
bite will cause a person to bleed from the eyes and become, as a biologist put it, “a corpse piece by piece.”) Lynch swerved around the snake, while the roar of the engine sent other animals, including howler monkeys, scattering into the treetops; only the mosquitoes seemed to remain, hovering over the vehicles like sentries.
    After stopping several times to camp, the expedition followed the trail to a clearing along the Xingu River, where Lynch tried to get a reading on his GPS.
    “What is it?” one of his colleagues asked.
    Lynch stared at the coordinates on the screen. “We’re not far from where Fawcett was last seen,” he said.
    A net of vines and lianas covered the trails extending from the clearing, and Lynch decided that the expedition would have to proceed byboat. He instructed several members to turn back with some of the heaviest gear; once he found a place where a bush plane could land, he would radio in the coordinates, so that the equipment could be delivered by air.
    The remaining team members, including James, Jr., slipped the two boats into the water and began their journey down the Xingu. The currents carried them quickly, past spiny ferns and
buriti
palms, creepers and myrtles—an endless mesh that rose on either side of them. Shortly before sunset, Lynch was going around another bend, when he thought he spotted something on the distant bank. He lifted the brim of his hat. In a break amid the branches, he could see several pairs of eyes staring at him. He told his men to cut the engines; no one made a sound. As the boats drifted onto the shore, scraping against the sand, Lynch and