The Lost World of Agharti- the Mystery of Vril Power

by Alec MacLellan

  After that, all was silence, and only rumours have since emerged from the strange, dense jungles as to what happened to the three Englishmen – perhaps the most extraordinary being a claim voiced by Moscow Radio that Fawcett had become ‘a British secret agent in Brazil, regularly sending radio reports to the Foreign Office in London’!

  Mrs Nina Fawcett, the Colonel’s wife, grew convinced with the passage of time that her husband had not died at the hands of savage jungle Indians, but was being held a captive – in all probability because he had stumbled across some great secret like the Portuguese explorers in the document of 1734 that had so intrigued him.

  This is a point taken up by one of today’s greatest experts on subterranean legends, Dr Raymond Bernard, the American philosopher and archaeologist who now lives in Brazil. Writing in his monograph The Subterranean World (1960), he says:

  Many Brazilian students of the occult share with the wife of Colonel Fawcett the belief that he is still living with his son Jack as residents of a subterranean city whose entrance is through a tunnel in the Roncador Mountain range of northeast Mato Grosso where he was heading when last seen after leaving Cuiaba. The writer met in Cuiaba a native who claimed that his father was Fawcett’s guide and who offered to take him to a certain opening leading to the Subterranean World in the region of Roncador, which would indicate that Fawcett’s guide believed in the existence of subterranean cities and brought Fawcett to one, where he was held prisoner lest he reveal the secret of its whereabouts, which he might be forced to do on his return, whether he wished to or not.

  Dr Bernard believes that the lost city Fawcett was seeking was indeed of Atlantean origin, but was actually situated below ground. He says: ‘It is claimed that the Atlantean city for which he searched was not the ruins of a dead city on the surface, but a subterranean city with still living Atlanteans as its inhabitants.’

  The Roncador tunnel opening is said to be guarded by fierce Murcego – or Bat – Indians, according to several authorities, including the American naturalist Carl Huni, who has made a special study of the tribe and their relationship to the tunnel legends based on his years of residence in the Mato Grosso area. I quote from his essay, ‘The Mysterious Tunnels and Subterranean Cities of South America’ (1960):

  The entrance to the caverns is guarded by the Bat Indians, who are a dark-skinned, undersized race of great physical strength. Their sense of smell is more developed than that of the best of bloodhounds. Even if they approve of you and let you enter the caverns, I am afraid you will be lost to the present world, because they guard the secret very carefully and may not let those who enter leave.

  The Bat Indians live in caves, too, and go out at night into the surrounding jungles, but they have no contact with the real people down in the caverns below, who form a community by themselves and have a considerable population. People believe the subterranean cities they inhabit descended from the Atlanteans, who originally constructed them, but no one knows for sure. The name of the mountain range where these subterranean Atlantean cities exist is Roncador in northeast Matto Grosso. If you go in quest of these caverns, you take your life in your own hands as you may never be heard of again, like Fawcett.

  When I was in Brazil I heard a lot about the underground caverns and cities. It is however a long way from Cuiaba. It is near the river Araguaya, which empties into the Amazon. It is to the northeast of Cuiaba at the foot of a tremendously long mountain range named Roncador. I desisted to investigate further because I heard that they jealously guard the entrance to the tunnels from people.

  I know that a good part of the immigrants who helped in the uprising of General Isidoro Lopez back in 1928 disappeared into these mountains and were never seen again. It was under the reign of Dr Benavides who bombarded São Paulo for four weeks. Finally they made a truce for three days and let the 4,000 troops, who were mainly Germans and Hungarians, go out of town. About 3,000 of them went to Acre in the northwestern part of Brazil and about 1,000 disappeared into the caverns. I heard the story consistently. I remember it was at the southern end of Bananal Island (near Roncador Mountains).

  There are also caverns in Asia and many Tibetan travellers mention them. But as far as I know, the biggest ones are in Brazil and they exist at three different levels. I am sure I would get permission if I wanted to join them and they would accept me as one of theirs. I know they use no money at all, and their society is organised on a strictly democratic basis. The people do not become aged and live in everlasting harmony.

  This description of a subterranean ‘Utopia’ has caused Dr Raymond Bernard, whom I mentioned just now, to comment that it seems very similar to the society that Bulwer Lytton describes in his work, The Coming Race. Dr Bernard shares the opinion that Bulwer Lytton based his ‘novel’ on occult information that he had learned as a Rosicrucian.

  Dr Bernard is quite a remarkable figure himself, having settled some years ago in the city of Joinville in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Here he has established a small community known as the New California Subtropical Settlement which, he believes, is ideally placed for further research into the underground tunnels as well as being clear of any nuclear fallout in the event of a war between America and Russia, a subject which deeply absorbs him.

  Joinville, he says, is situated in the world’s ‘Radioactive Safety Zone’, for:

  It is a fact of meteorology that winds carrying radioactive dust from the Northern Hemisphere, when they reach the equator, are met and opposed by contrary winds coming up from the south, causing them to rise and circle back in a northerly direction. This protects the Southern Hemisphere against windborn fallout from the north, which will be the part of the world where World War III will be fought.

  With this in mind, Dr Bernard has urged readers of his works to instant action:

  A new migration should get under way from the Northern Hemisphere to the lower part of the Southern Hemisphere, the best part of which is the New Promised Land of Everlasting Spring and Tropical Fruits which I found in subtropical Santa Catarina in South Brazil after a 26 years search for a Terrestrial Paradise in the countries of Latin America. Here I am establishing a settlement of American vegetarians, organic gardeners and advanced thinkers anxious to live in a part of the world where alone a New Age can arise.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, Dr Bernard believes that the disaster which destroyed Atlantis was not merely fire and flood, but a ‘radioactive catastrophe, probably caused by a nuclear war, the legendary War of the Titans, which led to the earth shifting on its axis and bringing on a world deluge’.

  Dr Bernard’s concern with nuclear war has not, however, prevented his continued research into the subterranean passages of his adopted country, and indeed some of the settlers in his community have assisted in the work. Their discoveries have led him to believe that there may be an entrance to this network of tunnels somewhere in the vicinity of Joinville, though its actual location still remains elusive. He says:

  I have devoted years to investigating and studying the mysterious tunnels which honeycomb Santa Catarina, obviously built by an ancient race to reach subterranean cities. Research is still in progress. On a mountain near Joinville the choral singing of Atlantean men and women has been repeatedly heard – also the ‘canto gallo’ (cock crowing), which is the standard indication of the existence of a tunnel opening leading to a subterranean city. The crowing is not produced by a living animal, but probably by some machine.

  Dr Bernard also shares Harold Wilkins’s belief that Brazil was once a colony of Atlantis. Recently he said:

  It is claimed that Brazil was once an Atlantean colony. A later report states that an Atlantean city, with elaborate buildings, streets, etc., was found in the midst of the jungles of the Amazon. Also the Brazilian radio and press reported the discovery of a subterranean city by a group of scientists who entered a tunnel which opened on top of a mountain near the boundary of Parana and Santa Catarina and descended until they came to a subterranean city. A strange fri
ght came over the party and instead of studying it, they fled. What did they see? Probably the inhabitants of this subterranean city. Two ranchers living near the border of Parana and Santa Catarina came to the writer claiming they entered a tunnel there and travelled three days, finally descending and coming to an illuminated city in which they saw men, women and children. A member of their party got frightened and so they all returned.

  Although Dr Bernard treats such stories with understandable scepticism, he does believe that the Atlanteans built cities in the Amazon and Mato Grosso, and that they might well have constructed some of the tunnels to ‘migrate to the subterranean world of Agharti’ when the holocaust overwhelmed their homeland. Others, of course, made for the colonies in South America. He writes:

  It is claimed that the earth is honeycombed with a network of tunnels, which are especially abundant in South America; and that these tunnels lead to subterranean cities in immense cavities in the earth. Most famous of these tunnels is the ‘Roadway of the Incas’ which is said to stretch for several hundreds of miles south of Lima, Peru via Cuzco, Tiahuanaco and the Three Peaks, going on to the Atacama Desert where all traces of it is lost. Another branch runs to Brazil, where it is connected by tunnels to the coast. Here the tunnels go under the bottom of the ocean in the direction of the lost Atlantis. In this way Atlantis once had direct connection with its colonies in Brazil and Peru, through tunnels that run under the Atlantic Ocean and then under Brazil, passing through Parana and Santa Catarina to Mato Grosso and then on to Peru. They then ran down the Andes to Chile.

  In his monograph The Subterranean World, which I mentioned earlier, Dr Bernard says that there are persistent rumours among older residents in the Santa Catarina area where he lives about the existence of a subterranean race. There are also rumours about ‘subterranean vehicles’ that travel through the underground tunnels and are believed to be similar to those mentioned by Ferdinand Ossendowski in Tibet. There are those who believe these vehicles to be the ‘Flying Saucers’ which have so exercised the public imagination in recent years: we shall be returning to this controversy later in the book.

  Dr Bernard says that when he visited a group of Theosophists at São Lourenço he heard the story of one of their members (now, unfortunately, dead) who had apparently found a tunnel entrance and travelled all the way from Peru to Brazil in a subterranean passage. He also heard it said that in the slave days, runaway slaves used to enter a tunnel at Ponte Grosse, Parana, and travel all the way to the Mato Grosso underground, later returning by the same route after slavery was abolished.

  In the course of the monograph, Dr Bernard cites a number of colourful and supposedly true accounts by Brazilians about journeys they claim to have made through the underground tunnels. One typical example will suffice for them all, and is included because of the doctor’s pertinent observations at the end:

  Another Brazilian came to the writer saying he travelled through a smooth-cut, illuminated tunnel for three days, 20 hours a day, accompanied by two subterranean men he met at its entrance, until he came to an immense illuminated space filled with buildings and a fruit orchard and where lived men, women and children, also various animals, including lions and tigers, who were as tame as cats and dogs. The sexes lived apart and the women all looked as if in their teens, even though some were centuries old. Also these people were all an exact copy of each other, with no individual variation. Women produced children by parthenogenesis, and were all virgin mothers.

  One of the children ran over to him apparently unafraid and when he tried to pick it up (which is forbidden among these people) an avalanche of rocks fell upon him, but did not harm him, leading him to believe they were really projected images rather than real rocks. He escaped to the outside through an exit tunnel. There he met a man who told him he often visited this city, where he was well received, and rode on a subterranean vehicle from it to other cities. The illuminated central tunnel that led to this city was connected by about fifty or more radiating side tunnels to other subterranean cities in various parts of Brazil.

  Regarding this and previous Brazilian reports, the writer cannot guarantee that they are true, since the persons who made them had in most cases been impelled by monetary motives. However, in the main they agree with each other regarding (1) these subterranean cities being all illuminated, (2) inhabited by a super-race, (3) connected with each other by a network of tunnels. Where there is smoke there is fire, and while these reports may be fictitious, there is absolute certainty that subterranean people exist there, due to certain tunnels which positively exist in which the voices of men were heard, and which the writer hopes to investigate.

  The research of Harold Wilkins, Lewis Spence, Dr Raymond Bernard and others has, I think, substantiated the connection between Brazil and Atlantis, and similarly left us in no doubt as to the extent and importance of the ancient tunnels which once linked the lost continent and its ‘colonies’ in South America. Whether or not it was the Atlanteans who built the tunnels is a moot point, and as the passageways appear to be the handiwork of a period prior to that when the Atlantean empire flourished, this seems unlikely. We must therefore return to this absorbing mystery at a later point in the book.

  In the meantime, Dr Bernard has opened up an intriguing new field of inquiry with his comments about the tunnels being ‘illuminated’. For in a little booklet entitled Agharti published in Boston in 1951, we find that the author Robert Ernst Dickhoff, a Buddhist teacher who describes himself as ‘Sungma Red Lama’, confirms this statement. He says that Tibetan lamas have told him that: ‘these caverns are illuminated by a green luminescence which aids underground plant life there and lengthens human life.’

  Perhaps even more importantly for our study, Dr Dickhoff tells us that the subterranean tunnels which we have already discovered in Asia and South America are also to be found in North America. More extraordinary still, that the tunnels link up with those in South America and ultimately reach Agharti, thereby creating a gigantic underground network which literally links the United States with the rest of the world!

  Dr Dickhoff writes: ‘Tibetan Lamas are of the opinion that in America live in caves of vast proportions the survivors of a catastrophe which befell Atlantis … and that these caverns are connected by means of tunnels running clear to either of the two continents, Asia and America.’

  And, indeed, when we begin to look into the facts, we find that the United States most certainly has a tradition of subterranean passageways as ancient and fascinating as those we have already discovered….

  * Krupp expedition in the early 1900s went in search of an ancient city believed to be located somewhere in the western province of the Mato Grosso. The party was financed to the tune of £100,000 and with its modern equipment, armed men, Indian guides and sturdy pack animals was perhaps the finest expedition which ever set off into the unknown heart of Brazil. However, the guides soon deserted the party, wild Indians began to attack them at every turn, and the explorers and their animals fell prey to the terrible jungle heat and appalling conditions. They, like their less well-prepared predecessors, ultimately had to turn tail and head back to civilization.

  * This view is substantiated in Ordonez de Aguiler’s Historia de Cielo, written late in the sixteenth century, in which the author says that Quetzalcoatl made several visits to and from Brazil from his home in Atlantis and ‘he was permitted to reach “the rock of heaven” [Atlantis] by a subterranean passage.’

  THE ‘UNDERWORLD’ OF NEW YORK

  Frank White was a gnarled old prospector who had spent many years of his life wandering about the remoter regions of California. The grandson of one of the famous ‘Forty-niners’ who had struck it rich in the great gold rush of 1848 (and then squandered the fortune on wine, women and bad investments), Frank was a loner who had never quite been able to bring himself to give up the search for the elusive gold mine he knew was just waiting for him somewhere in the region.

  But in the spring of 1935 Frank a
t last made a strike – though his discovery was not the precious metal he so desired. Instead it was an underground tunnel which contained some of the most extraordinary artifacts modern eyes have ever looked upon.

  Frank’s discovery came to public notice when he arrived in the town of Brawley not far from the River Colorado and the Mexican border. He had been wandering through the mountains and deserts of California as far north as Death Valley and south to the Gila mountains, he said. During this time he had accidentally stumbled upon a small cleft in the rocks and, investigating, found that it opened out into an underground passage.

  Armed only with a small prospector’s lamp he had walked along the tunnel, which was about eight feet high with smooth, carefully crafted walls, for about half an hour. Suddenly, he had noticed a strange light up ahead.

  ‘It was green – a sort of sinister green light,’ he said. ‘It got brighter as I walked along, and then the tunnel opened into a large cave.’

  In the cave, Frank White was greeted by the extraordinary sight of a number of mummified bodies lying either on the floor or propped up against rocks. The fluorescent light which glowed over everything seemed to make the bodies even more gruesome, and their distorted poses gave Frank the distinct impression that death had crept up on them unexpectedly.

  The old prospector shivered despite himself and quickly looked around the chamber of death. Along one wall were a number of statues that seemed to sparkle dimly in the green light, as if they might be made of gold. The faces, too, appeared to be strangely similar to those of ancient Inca gods he had once seen. Frank also noticed that the corpses were dressed in strange garments that looked as if they might be leather. Yet he told himself he had never seen anything quite like it before. His only thought was that it might have been a treasure house of some kind. ‘I felt as if I had stepped into somewhere very ancient,’ he said later. ‘That the people had somehow been laying like that quite unchanged from the very earliest times. But how long I just couldn’t even begin to guess.’