How It All Goes Down
The Vanishing
- This chapter begins, "How easily the Amazon can deceive" (2.1). Really? We've always had such good customer service from them.
- Grann describes the path of the Amazon River, from "a trickle of crystal water" (2.2) to a river that "expels fifty-seven million gallons of water every second" (2.4) into the Atlantic. That's almost as much water as Amy Poehler uses in Beverly Hills.
- We're told that in 1996, an explorer named James Lynch entered the Amazon searching for signs of Percy Fawcett, who had disappeared many decades earlier.
- Like Fawcett before him, Lynch also brought his son on the expedition.
- Also like Fawcett, Lynch, too, disappears, although not for nearly as long.
- During their expedition, Lynch and his party are taken prisoner by a group of local natives.
- The natives take Lynch and his son into the jungle, which is, Lynch thinks, "the most beautiful place he had ever seen" (2.35).
- If you're going to be taken prisoner in a hostile land, at least hope it's a pretty one.