What drove the British, from the start of the age of empire to its closing chapters in the 20th century, to all corners of the globe? Was it money, glory, adventure, or was it the dismal reality of their isles? Were they fueled by the simple need to get as far from Nottingham and Bath as possible, away from the cold gray rain? Was a craving for color the wind at their back? (Ambition belongs to those with a taste for citrus who live in a land where no citrus is grown.) The quest grew increasingly frenzied as the age ripened and there seemed ever fewer places to explore. As economists say, scarcity creates demand. This era was a moment ago yet seems ancient; the names of its heroes ring like names in a fairy tale: Richard Burton, Ernest Shackleton, David Livingstone. Some of the most daring converged on the Amazon, where hunter-gatherers still lived on human brains and even the most gaudy human creations were swallowed by vines if left for a week. In his outstanding new book, “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” David Grann tells the story of one of these adventurers, Percy Fawcett, “the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose.”

R. De Montet-Guerin

Percy Fawcett

THE LOST CITY OF Z

A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

By David Grann

Illustrated. 339 pp. Doubleday. $27.50

Fawcett was born in Devon, England, in 1867. In photos, he looks like the hero of a Saturday morning serial, the man who falls out of a plane and lands in a haystack. He got the jones for exploring, which, back then, you could catch like a fever, while stationed with the Royal Artillery in Ceylon. An officer had given him a note turned up by a local, which, in the life of Fawcett, serves the same function as the map in “Treasure Island.” “Beneath these rocks is a cave,” it read, “once easy to enter, but now difficult to approach as the entrance is obscured by stones, jungle and long grass. . . . In that cave is a treasure . . . [of] uncut jewels and gold to an extent greater than that possessed of many kings.”

Fawcett did not find that particular treasure, but was hooked by the notion of treasure hunting in general. The rest of his life was one long quest. His mishaps and triumphs were followed by would-be adventurers around the world. An entry from his diary provided the germ ofArthur Conan Doyle’s novel “The Lost World.” Fawcett worked with the British Geographical Society, which was in the process of mapping the globe. On his first trip into the Amazon in 1906, he was charged with fixing the border between Brazil and Bolivia. “By then, most of the world had been explored,” Grann writes, “its veil of enchantment lifted, but the Amazon remained as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.” Fawcett emerged nearly a year later, gaunt but exhilarated, with a taste for the forest, its solitude and its menace. It became an addiction like heroin: transcendent at first, increasingly consuming, ultimately fatal.

In the course of his travels, Fawcett heard whispers of a kingdom, a civilization overgrown and forgotten. He began spotting clues everywhere, in the customs of the Indians, in oral histories and legends. He took to calling it, no one knows why, the City of Z, which, when stripped of pseudoscience, revealed itself to be El Dorado, the fabled city of gold chased after by conquistadors since 1541, when Gonzalo Pizarro took hundreds of men into the jungle and emerged months later with a few dozen walking corpses. In his quest for Z, Fawcett became a living symbol, the British officer, at the end of the British age, in search of a ruined empire, thus a glimpse of his own nation’s fate.

Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, tells two stories: of the explorer chasing his mirage, and of the reporter chasing the explorer chasing his mirage — twin obsessions spun together like strands on a helix. Fawcett going here and there to raise money for his next escapade, Grann going after him, from Brooklyn to the Amazon, like going from Paris to the moon. “Let me be clear,” Grann writes. “I am not an explorer or an adventurer. I don’t climb mountains or hunt. I don’t even like to camp. I stand less than 5 feet 9 inches tall and am nearly 40 years old, with a blossoming waistline and thinning black hair.”

The book is screwball, in other words, a hybrid in which the weak, fear-wracked reporter from the present age confronts the crazed iron men of yore, citizens of a country as grand and gone as the kingdom of the Incas. The result is a powerful narrative, stiff lipped and Victorian at the center, trippy at the edges, as if one of those stern men of Conrad had found himself trapped in a novel by García Márquez. Along the way, Grann examines dozens of subjects that seem more and more mythical, suggesting a kind of magical non­fiction — the myth of the white Indian, for example, the fate of explorers who vanished searching for Fawcett, the habits of carnivorous fish, some which latch on to and live off the holiest, most tender of human organs. But in the end, the book is mostly about the jungle itself, the real and shrinking wilderness that can be traversed on Google maps, but also the wilderness as a metaphor that can be glimpsed but never charted — the world as it really is, where everything wants to infect you and even flowers want you dead. Which is why Fawcett, in his relentless drive into the bush, supposedly in pursuit of a goal but really going because going is the same as being alive, is a stand-in for all those who keep feeding themselves to the beast. This is what Grann means when he writes of his own magazine stories: “They typically have one common thread: obsession. They are about ordinary people driven to do extraordinary things — things that most of us would never dare — who get some germ of an idea in their heads that metastasizes until it consumes them.”

At times, and perhaps it’s a natural outgrowth of the subject, the book can become tedious, in the way that an obsessed person can become tedious. It’s hot in the weeds where the sun beats down. I suppose it’s how the guides felt as they followed Fawcett through miles of undifferentiated jungle. Chapters follow a predictable pattern — many begin with the same trick: a line of dialogue backed by a quick establishing shot — with sections on Fawcett, then sections on Grann, then on Fawcett, until the whole thing, strung together, comes to resemble a friendship bracelet. As for the prose, it’s a bit like the cinematography in a Sydney Pollack film — so deft it’s invisible, at total service to the story, but with none of the tracking or crane shots or wild flights of fancy that linger in the mind.

Fawcett disappeared in 1925. In the final pages, which are terrifically exciting, the book reads like an adventure story for boys, the sort that is accompanied by drawings of diamond skulls and scorpion kings. Grann follows his subject all the way to an Indian village in a remote region called the Xingu, where he meets probably the last person to see the explorer alive. (Grann thinks he found the remnants of Z, but you can be the judge of that.) The Indians tell Grann what they’ve been telling the others who started hunting for Fawcett almost as soon as he disappeared: the white man went over the hill and never came back.

In the end, “The Lost City of Z” has the odd effect of making the present age seem small, its heroes like museum miniatures. They had explorers who blazed trails, we have journalists who follow trails already blazed in search of explorers. They had parchment and clues. We have GPS and Google maps, where the blank areas hide military installations. Which makes sense. When you can buy a pineapple in Devon in February, why leave home?