The Electric Typewriter

by David Grann

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British explorer, disappeared in 1925 while trying to uncover a lost civilization hidden in the Amazon, which he had named, simply, the City of Z. In the next seven decades, scores of explorers had tried and failed to retrace Fawcett’s path. Some nearly died of starvation, while others retreated in the face of tribes that attacked with poisoned arrows. Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, instead, disappeared along with him, swallowed by the same forests in the Mato Grosso region which travellers had long ago christened the “green hell.”