Word: fawcett
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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...
...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...
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 solimán, 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...
...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...