The Search for City X

Of the many expolorers who have sought traces of Atlantis none was more dedicated than Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett. A self-proclaimed lone wolf, the determined British army surveyor spent the early years of his century mapping the jungles of Ceylon and South America. In 1908 he led a team that survyed the border between Brazil and Bolivia. By 1925, retired from the army, he was ready for an ambitious expedition of his own; the search for a legendary ruined city in the jungles of Brazil.

Fawcett was encouraged in his belief of the lost city when he acquired an old map showing a nameless city in the little known Mato Grosso area of southwest Brazil. Accompanied by his son and his son's friend Raleigh Rimmel, the adventurer set forth into the jungle in search of the place he called City X. Then, after writing to his wife about rumors of an ancient metropolis on a lake, Fawcett and his two young companions disappeared. Their remains were never found.

As a legend at least, Percy Fawcett lived on. For decades afterward, South American travelers related tales of gaunt old med seen along jungle pathways who called themseves Fawcett. Some said they had met blue-eyed, part-Indian children fathered by the adventurers. Others reported that Fawcett had found the idyllic City X and refused to leave.

But the most remarkable account of the explorer to reach the outside world involved the Irish medium and psychic Geraldine Cummins who claimed in 1936 that she was receiving mental messages from Fawcett. Cummins said the Englishman had found the relics of Atlantis in the jungle but was now ill and semiconscious. After four such messages, "Fawcett" fell silent until 1948. In that year, he reported his own death.

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