![]() ![]() For hundreds of years, it has haunted geographers, archaeologists, empire builders, treasure hunters, and philosophers. In an age of airplanes and satellites, the area remains one of the last blank spaces on the map. The ancient city, with its network of roads and bridges and temples, was believed to be hidden in the Amazon, the largest jungle in the world. I told myself that I had come simply to record how generations of scientists and adventurers became fatally obsessed with solving what has often been described as “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”-the whereabouts of the lost City of Z. And I had convinced myself that that was why I had traveled more than ten thousand miles, from New York to London to the Xingu River, one of the longest tributaries of the Amazon, why I had spent months poring over hundreds of pages of Victorian diaries and letters, and why I had left behind my wife and one-year-old son and taken out an extra insurance policy on my life. While others often seemed to succumb to their mad dreams and obsessions, I tried to be the invisible witness. I had always considered myself a disinterested reporter who did not get involved personally in his stories. Yet it seemed less like a signpost than like a taunt, another testament to my folly. The letter Z was still visible in the center of the map. I stared at my markings, hoping that they might lead me out of the Amazon, rather than deeper into it. It was wet and crumpled, the lines I had traced to highlight my route now faded. You must not believe the search for it can stop. ![]() ![]() At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city… If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, ![]()
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