Free The Lost City of Z by David Grann Page B

Redhill, Surrey, to No. 1 Savile Row, in the Mayfair district of London, but nothing in the city moved— or, more accurately, everything seemed to be moving. Billboard men. Butcher boys. Clerks. Horse-drawn omnibuses. And that strange beast which was invading the streets, scaring the horses and pedestrians, breaking down on every curb: the automobile. The law had originally required drivers to proceed at no more than two miles per hour with a footman walking ahead waving a red flag, but in 1896 the speed limit had been raised to fourteen miles per hour. And everywhere Fawcett turned the new and the old seemed to be at war: electric lights, scattered on the fancier granite streets, and gas lamps, lodged on most cobblestoned corners, glowing in the fog; the Tube bolting through the earth like one of Edward Fawcett’s science-fiction inventions, and bicycles, only a few years earlier the smartest thing on the footpaths and now already fusty. Even the smells seemed at odds: the traditional stench of horse dung and the newer whiff of petrol. It was as if Fawcett were glimpsing the past and the future at once.
    Since he had left England for Ceylon fourteen years earlier, London seemed to have become more crowded, more dirty, more modern, more rich, more poor, more everything. With over four and a half million people, London was the biggest city in the world, larger than Paris or New York. Flower girls yelled, “All a growin’ and all a blowin’!” Newspaper boys cried, “ ’Orrible murder!”
    As Fawcett pushed his way through the crowds, he no doubt struggled to keep his clothes free of the soot from coal furnaces that had mixed with fog to form London’s own species of grime, a tenacious black mixture that penetrated everything; even the keyholes on houses had to be sheathed with metal plates. Then there was the horse manure—“the London mud,” as it was politely called—which, though swept up by street urchins and sold door-to-door as garden fertilizer, was virtually everywhere Fawcett stepped.
    Fawcett turned onto an elegant street in Burlington Gardens, away from brothels and blacking factories. On the corner was a handsome stone house with a portico. It was No. 1 Savile Row. And Fawcett could see the bold sign: ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.
    As Fawcett entered the three-story house—the Society had not yet moved near to Hyde Park—he was aware that he was stepping into an enchanting place. Over the front door was a half window in the shape of a hemispherical lantern; each pane represented the parallels and meridians of a globe. Fawcett would have walked past the office of the chief clerk and his two assistants, past a stairwell that led to a council room, until he arrived at a glass-roofed chamber. Sunlight filtered in, illuminating, through dusty shafts, globes and chart tables. It was the map room, and usually sitting at the far end, on a dais, was the man Fawcett was looking for: Edward Ayearst Reeves.
    In his late thirties, with a receding hairline, beakish nose, and neatly trimmed mustache, Reeves was not only the map curator but also the chief instructor of surveying—and the person primarily charged with turning Fawcett into a gentleman explorer. A skilled draftsman, Reeves had startedworking at the Society in 1878, at the age of sixteen, as an assistant to the previous curator, and he never seemed to forget that sense of awe that newcomers felt upon arrival. “How well I remember it all,” he wrote in his autobiography,
The Recollections of a Geographer.
“With what pride, and yet with what fear and trembling I first entered the precinct of this wonderful place of which I had read in books, and from which explorers had been sent out to all parts of the world and returned to tell of their marvelous discovery and heroic adventures.” Unlike many of the bellicose, wild-eyed members of the Society, Reeves had a warm, gentle manner. “He had an innate capacity for teaching,” a colleague said. “He