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The Lost City of Z – David Grann

The room was dark. Nina Fawcett sat on one side of a table; on the other was a woman peering into a crystal ball. Nina, after years of searching for her husband and son in this world, had begun to look in another dimension.

She surrounded herself with psychics and soothsayers, many of whom sent her long letters detailing their attempts to contact the explorers. One medium told her that she was conscious of a presence in the room and, looking up, saw Fawcett standing by the window. The medium said that she asked him, "Are you alive or dead?" and Fawcett laughed and replied, "Can't you see that I am alive?" He added, "Give my love to Nina and tell her we are all right."

On another occasion, a medium reported that a young figure with a long beard floated before her. It was Jack. "'We shall see you someday," he said. Then he vanished, leaving "a most beautiful scent behind."

Fawcett's brother, Edward, told the RGS of Nina's descent into the occult, "Her life flows more easily thus."

She was not the only one who turned to psychics to find answers to what the visible world stubbornly refused to reveal. Toward the end of his life, Reeves, Fawcett's mentor at the RGS, had shocked his colleagues by becoming a spiritualist-or what was sometimes called a "spiritual surveyor." In the 1930s, he attended seances, searching for clues to Fawcett's fate. So did Fawcett's friend Sir Ralph Paget, the former Brazilian ambassador.

In the early 1940s, while attending a gathering in Seaford, England, at the house of the psychic Nell Montague, Paget placed a letter from Fawcett on the medium's crystal ball. Montague said that she saw three flickering white figures. One lay motionless on the ground. Another, who was older, was struggling to breathe and was clutching at a man with long hair and a beard. The crystal ball suddenly turned red, as if it were drenched in blood. Then Montague said she saw Indians with spears and arrows carrying off the three white men. The people in the room gasped. For the first time, Paget felt that his friend was dead.

ln 1949, Geraldine Cummins, a celebrated practitioner of "automatism," whereby a person purportedly goes into a trance and writes down messages from spirits, described how Jack and Raleigh were massacred by lndians. "Pain-stop pain!" Raleigh gasped, before dying. Fawcett, Cummins reported, eventually collapsed in a state of delirium: "The voices and sounds became a distant murmur as I now faced the greyness of death. It is a moment of unearthly horror . . . a time when the universe seems implacable and abiding loneliness apparent as the destiny of man."