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MARCO WERMAN: I'm Marco Werman. This is The World. Percy Harrison Fawcett was a classic British explorer. Like others in his mold, he wanted nothing less than to map the world. In 1906, he set out to chart the interior of the Amazon. Back then, it was a blank space on the map – about the size of the continental United States. But in 1925, Fawcett disappeared on a search for a fabled lost city.

DAVID GRANN: The idea or the notion of a lost city in the Amazon had kind of haunted the Western imagination for centuries – this great idea of El Dorado, this glittering kingdom. The conquistadors had first heard about it from the Indians when they first arrived in South America, had them search for it. Of course, all those expeditions all ended in disaster.

WERMAN: That's author David Grann.

GRANN: After about 3 centuries of pretty much a total of death and suffering pretty much worthy of Joseph Conrad, most people had concluded that this city was a delusion. But Fawcett, during this period when he was mapping the interior, began to gather clues that convinced him that it was possible.

WERMAN: David Grann's new book is called “The Lost City of Z”. That's what Percy Fawcett named the fabled city. At first, Fawcett's quest was driven by science.

GRANN: But he then went and he fought in World War I and he was actually at the Battle of The Sum, and he really watched the collapse of Western civilization. You know, he was there when they would just say, “Up boys. Up the ladder,” and watch his men just march into machine guns. And the Z began, at that point, to take on larger proportions in his mind, greater grandeur – almost a place that was almost spiritual at the end.

WERMAN: David, you're a staff writer for The New Yorker, and as you put it in the opening pages of the book, you consider yourself a “disinterested reporter.” How did you go about researching Percy Fawcett?

GRANN: I really began much more kind of in keeping with my character, which is tracking down documents in archives. There had never been a major biography about Fawcett, in part because people believed his papers had been lost or the family had kept them private. And I went on this kind of – it was almost like a treasure map tracking down descendants. And I really went all over the world trying to find these papers and diaries, and eventually I went to England and I met the granddaughter of Fawcett, and she invited me into her house. She was a very lovely woman named Roulette. She was all, “Do you really want to know what happened to my grandfather?” And I said, “Well, if it's possible, sure.” She led me into a back room, and in that back room was this old chest. She opened the chest, and inside were all these books. They were covered in dust; the bindings were disintegrated. I said, “What are they?” She said, “Well, those are my grandfather's diaries and log books.” And as I began to go through these and piece together his life, I found lots of clues to where he had actually gone, where was the location of Z. And at a certain point, I guess the one thing I had in common with Fawcett -- I'm fairly obsessive by nature, and at that point I decided to do something pretty stupid and go into the jungle.

WERMAN: Well, I mean, that's a big leap, I imagine, for somebody who is more interested in doing the research and blowing dust off the books and papers and documents.

GRANN: Yeah. Yeah.

WERMAN: You know? What pushed you to the point where you say, “I'm going into the Amazon now.”

GRANN: I think when obsession begins to consume you with something, you don't do things in a methodical process. I mean, I had a one-year-old boy and I try not to, you know, sugarcoat it. I mean, there's a selfishness or a blindness that takes over and you do things that, you know, do have consequences. Normally as a writer, when you're working on a story, you have some sense of what you might find and what the end might be. This was a quest that I was setting out on, you know, kind of, “What am I going to find? This guy disappeared 80 years ago, 85 years ago. And, you know, is this city just a figment of his imagination?” So I hadn't ever quite rolled the dice so much, not just with my life but also with what am I actually going to find? And the other element that kept going through my mind is, you know, I had all of Fawcett's letters and I would read the ordeals -- and that filled my imagination with fairly terrifying thoughts. You know, he would be describing themselves starving and stuff like that.

WERMAN: Take us on the journey, if you would -- or at least a stretch of the journey – that, you know, where you kind of settled into a groove and you said, “All right. I started at point A – that's way back there. We're headed on here.”

GRANN: Sure. One of the things that was really interesting was when I started out, I had Fawcett's letters and in the early stage, Fawcett was describing hacking through jungle, and I was looking out at this stage and I couldn't see any forest. There was nothing there. It had all been cut down, and it was like looking at Nebraska. But then we moved deeper and deeper, and as we moved into the Xingu region, we really entered the wilderness. And at that point, what Fawcett was describing in the letters conformed very much to our experience, where the jungle was incredibly deep and I was extraordinarily out of shape. And I have to be the only fool who carried a little computer with him and a computer bag into the jungle. And I would put this on my head and go through swamps and carry it on top of my head, thinking, ”What am I doing?” And by that time, the batteries had expired.

WERMAN: I was gonna say, when did it stop working?

GRANN: Yeah. It had stopped working but I kind of thought I needed it early in the trip to write things up and you just kind of – you're the modern traveler and I would carry this with me on top of my head and we kept moving. I would say the worst moment on the trip was that as we gathered clues about what happened, I thought, “You know, maybe it's time to turn back.” But I knew that Z – where he believed Z was was a little bit further north, and so we pushed on. And it was on that trip when I got lost from my guide and separated for several hours.

WERMAN: Which may not sound like a lot, but in what Fawcett called “a green hell”, that must be pretty scary.

GRANN: Yeah. No, it was very scary because I had been marching for a long time, and at that point, I was totally lost. And if you're lost in a jungle, unless you're Fawcett you're going to die. I mean, I didn't even have a weapon. I didn't even have any food. I had kind of been going in circles and I kept thinking this was the path, and there was no path. And eventually, there were some kids. Initially, I didn't know what they were. I just saw kind of shadows flitting, and then they took me and they led me to their settlement. And my guide was actually sitting in the settlement, and he said, “I'm sorry I didn't go back for you.” He said, “I barely made it.”

WERMAN: My gosh.

GRANN: So, you know.

WERMAN: Do you dream about the jungle?

GRANN: You know, I'm not haunted by it, but once was definitely enough for me. I don't think I'll be trekking through the jungle for a while.

WERMAN: I was gonna say. I want to ask you a question about obsession, but I'm wondering if Percy Fawcett the man became your own Z?

GRANN: Oh yeah. No. Without question. No. Fawcett was my Z, and I often thought about biographers who were kind of driven mad by their subjects. And I know Fawcett was essentially driven mad by trying to find Z at the end of his life. And there was a moment when I was actually lost in the jungle where I became furious at him and I cursed him. You know, he had many admirable qualities. He was about as daring as anyone. He treated Native Americans much better than people for his time period. But he took his son into a jungle on a trip where the chances of them surviving were miniscule and basically led and marched his son to his death. And the thing that I – that always haunted me and I'll never know was that one moment, when death was upon them, what went through his mind when he knew that he had just taken a son who he adored, and a son who worshiped him, to his death?

WERMAN: David Grann, very nice to speak with you. Thank you.

GRANN: Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

WERMAN: David Grann's book is “The Lost City of Z.” And David narrates a slideshow of photos from the book at theworld.org. News headlines are next on PRI, Public Radio International.

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