“I'm afraid I can't tell you anything,” Fawcett recalled him saying. “There's a ruin up there they call the ‘King's Bath,' which may once have been a tank [reservoir] or something, but as for rocks-why, dammit, it's all rocks!” He recommended that Fawcett talk to a local headman named Jumna Das, a descendant of the Kandyan kings who ruled the country until 1815. “If anyone can tell you where Galla-pita-Galla is, it's him,” the Englishman said.
That evening, Fawcett found Jumna Das, who was tall and elderly, with an elegant white beard. Das explained that the treasure of the Kandyan kings was rumored to have been buried in this region. There was no doubt, Das went on, that archaeological remains and mineral deposits lay around the foothills to the southeast of Badulla, perhaps near Galla-pita-Galla.
Fawcett was unable to locate the treasure, but the prospect of the jewels still glimmered in his mind. “Did the hound find its greatest pleasure in the chase or in the killing of its quarry?” he wondered. Later, he set out again with a map. This time, with the help of a team of hired laborers, he discovered a spot that seemed to resemble the cave described in the note. For hours, the men dug as mounds of earth formed around them, but all they uncovered were shards of pottery and a white cobra, which sent the workers scattering in terror.
Fawcett, despite his failure, relished his flight from everything he knew. “Ceylon is a very old country, and ancient peoples had more wisdom than we of today know,” Das told Fawcett.
That spring, after reluctantly returning to Fort Frederick, Fawcett learned that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a nephew of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, was planning to visit Ceylon. A gala party was announced in Ferdinand's honor, and many of the ruling elite, including Fawcett, turned out. The men wore long black dress coats and white silk cravats, the women billowing bustle skirts, with corsets pulled so tight they could barely breathe. Fawcett, who would have worn his most ceremonial dress, was a commanding and charismatic presence.
“He obviously did exert some fascination on women,” a relative observed. Once, at a charity event, a reporter noted that “the way the ladies obeyed him was a sight for a king.” Fawcett did not meet Ferdinand, but he spotted a more alluring figure, a girl who seemed no more than seventeen or eighteen, her skin pale, her long brown hair pinned atop her head, highlighting her exquisite features. Her name was Nina Agnes Paterson, and she was the daughter of a colonial magistrate.
Although Fawcett never acknowledged it, he must have felt some of the desires that so terrified him. (Among his papers he had kept a fortuneteller's warning: “Your greatest dangers come through women, who are greatly attracted to you, and to whom you are greatly attracted, yet they more often bring you sorrow and boundless troubles than anything else.”) Not permitted by custom to approach Nina and ask her to dance, he had to find someone to officially present him, which he did.
Despite being bubbly and flighty, Nina was highly cultured. She spoke German and French, and had been tutored in geography, religious studies, and Shakespeare. She also shared some of Fawcett's brashness (she advocated women's rights) and independent curiosity (she liked to explore the island and read Buddhist texts).
The next day Fawcett wrote to his mother to tell her that he had met the ideal woman, “the only one I want to marry.” Nina lived with her family on the opposite end of the island, in Galle, in a large house filled with servants, and Fawcett made pilgrimages to court her. He began to call her “Cheeky,” in part, one family member said, because “she always had to have the last word;” she, in turn, called him “Puggy,” because of his tenacity. “I was very happy and I had nothing but admiration for Percy's character: an austere, serious and generous man,” Nina later told a reporter.
On October 29, 1890, two years after they met, Fawcett proposed. “My life would have no meaning without you,” he told her. Nina agreed immediately, and her family held a party to celebrate. But, according to relatives, some members of Fawcett's family opposed the engagement and lied to Fawcett, telling him that Nina was not the lady he thought she was-in other words, that she was not a virgin. It is unclear why the family objected to the marriage and leveled such an allegation, but Fawcett's mother appears to have been at the center of the machinations. In a letter years later to Conan Doyle, Fawcett implied that his mother had been “a silly old thing and an ugly old thing for being so hateful” to Nina, and that she had “a good deal to make up for.” At the time, though, Fawcett's fury was unleashed not at his mother but at Nina. He wrote her a letter, saying, “You are not the pure young girl I thought you to be.” He then terminated their engagement.
For years, they had no more contact. Fawcett remained at the fort, where, high on the cliffs, he could see a pillar dedicated to a Dutch maiden who, in 1687, had leaped to her death after her fiancé deserted her. Nina, meanwhile, returned to Great Britain. “It took me a long time to recover from this blow,” she later told a reporter, though concealing the true reason for Fawcett's decision. Eventually, she met a captain in the Army named Herbert Christie Prichard, who was either unaware of the charge against her or unwilling to cast her out. In the summer of 1897, the two wed. But five months later he collapsed from a cerebral embolism. As Nina put it, “Destiny cruelly struck me again for the second time.” Moments before he died, Prichard reputedly told her, “Go… and marry Fawcett! He is the real man for you.” By then, Fawcett had discovered his family's deception and, according to one relative, wrote to Nina and “begged her to take him back.”
“I thought I had no love left for him,” Nina confessed. “I thought that he had killed the passion I had for him with his brutish behavior.” But, when they met again, she could not bring herself to rebuff him: “We looked at each other and, invincibly this time, happiness jumped all over us. We had found each other again!”
On January 31, 1901, nine days after Queen Victoria died, ending a reign that lasted almost sixty-four years, Nina Paterson and Percy Harrison Fawcett were finally married, and eventually settled at the military garrison in Ceylon. In May 1903, their first child, Jack, was born. He looked like his father, only with his mother's fairer skin and finer features. “A particularly beautiful boy,” Fawcett wrote. Jack seemed preternaturally gifted, at least to his parents. “He ran about at seven months old and talked freely at a year old,” Fawcett boasted. “He was and is, physically and intellectually, far ahead.”