Publisher's Synopsis
This Three-Act play, like its One-Act predecessor "Death Dreams" is about the final years of Colonel Percy. H. Fawcett. I was intending to keep the original title of the previous play for the full version, but the reasons for the change will be apparent on reading the text. Rather than being a strict chronology, the play concentrates on Fawcett's beliefs and what compelled him to make the fatal last expedition in 1925 with his son, Jack, and Raleigh Rimmel. I have used the documented sources and the ideas reflected in the text are borne out by a close reading of Fawcett's many letters and articles he wrote for occult magazines. Fawcett was disillusioned with his life after serving on the Western Front and this, I believe, proved to be the catalyst for events that unfolded. All I can aim for is an understanding of the turmoil that compelled this enigmatic man.Mystic, scholar, theosophist, legendary explorer of South America, Colonel Percy Fawcett never wavered in his beliefs and his reputation is assured. I have included an extract from the play in which Fawcett is speaking with Sir Henry Rider Haggard. It was Rider Haggard who gave Fawcett the strange statuette, with undecipherable petroglyphs, that he carried with him on the last expedition. Fawcett: You haven't got Cetewayo's staff, Rider?I Haggard: I left it in my study. I saw no need of it today. The weather at Ditchingham is most congenial. You were telling me the other day you were pondering on the object of myths and the truthfulness of their meaning. Thoughts and perceptions, I always believed they inferred. They could speak of what the fictional gods and goddesses believed to be ourselves. The origin of who we are is to be found in the old fairy tales if you understand their subtlety. Tell me your theories. Remember the myth of Oedipus? Fawcett: I believe there are hidden musings. Some of the more intriguing stories have been neglected. The people are not to blame for this because they left their villages and came to the towns and cities, searching for employment when there was no work in the fields. There was no need to tell the old stories again on a winter's evening afterwards when people were so weary after working in the damned factories and foundries. (Pauses, half laugh). Nothing is ever forgotten, is it? I see London and there is a hidden city there, with its sacred geometry, that will instil itself in the memory, revealing all through confused dreams. The first people who walked these fields and meadows understood that and they left the enigma of their monuments and the myths of London's legendary founders that are ridiculed by some. The connection, as I have long argued, rests with a cataclysm that destroyed an ancient culture thousands of years ago. It was foretold; the elders prepared for the survivors to bring their sacred knowledge to different areas of the globe. The survivors became complacent, forgetting their origins, and the stories were told in their myths. You have heard this so many times before, one way or another, and it must be tiresome, Rider.
