Where Z?

Jason Colavito a month ago took some time off his busy schedule chasing aliens and Tucker Carlson around the internet, and posted something more-serious. No, not about James Dean this time; I mean Colonel Percy Fawcett's "city of Z".

I hasten to remind my audience, and maybe Colavito's audience, that the Amazon highlands, abutting the Huari and then Inca imperia, actually... has lost cities. We're finding them all over the place. Upano was reported to us only three months ago. But where's "Z"? Z was supposed to be in the "Thick Bush" province, which is what Brasil says it is. That's downstream and east of Casarabe, let alone Upano.

Colavito argues, at least transmits an argument: (1) that MS 512 "sexed up" a more-sober geographic work and (2) that Fawcett misread MS 512, so lost himself up the jungle. That earlier work referred to Bahia not the Mato Grosso. Bahia, of course, means bay; on the eastern coast.

This is no cidade perdida. It is, rather, a natural formation. Sometimes these things happen... as Colavito keeps having to remind us all. The Tupi-speaking locals may well have considered the rocks to be built by some alien race themselves; pictographs (itacoatiara) are painted all over it. For them, Colavito reads inscrição enigmática as an unfortunate interpretation, like so many canali on Mars.

I remain unsure the enigmata of those inscriçãoes, late or early, have themselves been figured. Maybe OldEuropeanCulture blog will have-at-it.

All that said, the movie claimed that Fawcett had found, wherever he got up to, genuine artifacts, beyond the ken of the Fierce People of the forest, and quite different from Tupi-ware. Imports down from Casarabe, would be my thought.

And then we get that hoary shipmate's-tale of those cities of Hy-Brasil. An earlier post pondered the Porcupine Bank; I was also pondering if some Basque or Lisbonite (straying further than the Muslims) found the ruins on (say) Cozumel. Now I must ask, if such a sailor traipsed further south, into that Brasilian Bay, and returned back...?