Brazil is the fourth largest country in the world, occupying nearly half the total area of South America. Its great capital city, Brasilia, and two magnificent ports of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are internationally famous and present an air of sophistication and culture that has led some people to suggest that ultimately the nation will become one of the world’s leading nations.

Yet beyond the coastal lowlands facing the Atlantic Ocean lie some of the most impenetrable jungles and hostile environments to be found anywhere – as well as perhaps the most mysterious area in the world, the Amazon basin. On the northern frontier of Brazil there also stands the cloud-capped plateau of Mount Roraima, `The Lost World‘, immortalized in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great novel.

It is, in truth, a mysterious country, much of it still awaiting thorough exploration, and harbouring the most amazing and controversial legends. What is already evident is that there are clear signs that an incredibly ancient civilization – at least 30,000 and possibly as much as 60,000 years old – once flourished here, and that there is much evidence that cultivated white men of an unknown race once walked the country in company with their dark-skinned brethren.

There is also no denying that in the comparatively short time that Brazil has been known to the rest of the world – the first European, the Portuguese Pedro Cabral, did not reach the shore until 1500 – we have barely started to penetrate the outer realms of all this mystery. Here, though, we must try and assemble as much material as we can on the twin mysteries of the ancient white race of Brazil and the network of subterranean tunnels with which they are inextricably associated.

In neither case is this a dead or dying tradition. For example, Harold Wilkins remarks at one point in his Mysteries of Ancient South America: `It is probable that descendants of this white empire exist, today, in more than one part of unexplored Brazil, and among the Andean outliers, in regions rich with gold, on the confines of the Amazon’s headwaters.’ And again, later: `There are many stories of the existence of strange white people today – handsome bearded men and beautiful, white nude women with symmetrical Greek features – in the unknown sertao of the central Mato Grosso and the Brazilian highlands, and northwards and northwestwards in the mountains beyond the headwaters of the Amazon and its tributaries.’ Equally, in his book, The Hollow Earth, Dr Raymond Bernard, a resident in Brazil, assures us that `mysterious tunnels, an enigma to archaeologists, exist in great numbers under Brazil, where they open on the surface in various places.

The most famous is in the Roncandor Mountains of northwest Mato Grosso, to where Colonel Fawcett was heading when last seen.’ We shall be investigating the information on both of these topics – as well as the mystery of Colonel Fawcett – a little later in this chapter as we pursue our quest for the secret of Agharti. Brazil has, of course, a good many legends of ancient cities now in ruins, all hidden in the vast hinterland. Many expeditions have set out to find them since the country was claimed by Portugal in 1500 and coastal colonies were established in 1532. From the very beginning, the explorers were fired by stories the natives told of lost cities where enormous hoards of gold and silver just lay awaiting discovery. The terrible climate, the hostile jungle natives and the enigmatic nature of so many of the reports doomed expedition after expedition to failure. From the earliest attempts of small bands of Portuguese fortune hunters, by way of the Brazilian bandeiristas of the eighteenth century, to the expensively equipped expedition financed by the Krupp Armament Works of Germany in the early years of this century – as ill-fated as most of its predecessors – the ruins and vast wealth left by people long since gone from memory have proved singularly elusive. But from all this endeavour has come the information which, with the passage of time, we have been able to shape into an explanation of some of the mysteries of Brazil.

(‘The 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.) Based on the geological evidence that we have, there seems little doubt that tropical South America includes some of the most ancient land on the Earth’s surface that was never submerged by the ocean nor ground under the tremendous glaciers of the Ice Age. This has led archaeologists to speculate that this now mysterious heartland may very well have been the cradle of the Earth’s civilization from which it later spread outwards to Europe and Africa on one side, and Asia on the other.

(By comparison, at this period some 60,000 years ago, our European ancestors were living in caves in the regions of what are now Pyrenean France, Cantabrian Spain and Lacustrine Switzerland.)

Being a region of such antiquity has, inevitably, caused the South American continent to be linked with that ancient and mighty lost landmass of Atlantis. And it is the belief of a number of scholars and archaeologists, myself included, that Atlantis once formed a virtual land link between its neighbour continents of Europe to the east and South America to the west. Such a belief explains the similarities in culture and relics found on either side of what is now the Atlantic ocean, and helps demonstrate how it was possible for the tunnels of South America to be linked with the subterranean passages in Europe and Asia, all ultimately converging on Agharti.

Let us look at the evidence. In the Popul Vuh, an ancient Guatemalan manuscript whose title means ‘The Collection of Written Leaves’, and which has been described as ‘the great storehouse of Mayan and Central American legend and mythical history’, there is much talk of ‘a land in the east on the shores of the sea’. Such a location neatly fits our knowledge of the position of Atlantis. This same work tells us that it was from this land ‘that the fathers of the people had come’ and that they also endured a ‘great catastrophe’ after which the land to the east disappeared. And having said this, can these following words from the Popul Vuh be anything other than a description of the destruction of Atlantis and its effect on its neighbour?

There came a great flood, followed by a thick rain of bitumen and resin, when men ran, here and there, in despair and madness. They tried, beside themselves with terror, to climb on the roofs of houses, which crumbled and threw them to the ground. Trees they tried to ascend, which threw them far away. They sought to enter caves and grottoes and immediately they were shut in from the exterior.

The earth darkened and it rained night and day. Thus was accomplished the ruin of the race of man which was given up to destruction. Cautiously, and based on the evidence of the Popul Vuh, plus his own researches, our archaeologist Harold Wilkins draws the ties between Atlantis and South America still closer together. He writes in Mysteries of Ancient South America: One of the South American colonies of Atlantis may, probably, have been the land called Brazil, and Brazil, indeed, was actually the ancient name of the land and borne thousands of years before the arrival at Rio de Janeiro of old Pedro Cabral, the Portuguese navigator.

That occurred in AD 1500 and has given rise to the sheer legend that King Emanuel of Portugal named the land Brazil, because the dye-wood, brazil-wood (Biancaea sappan) was found there. As a matter of very curious fact, the name Brazil was known to the old Irish Kelts as Hy-Brazil. There are also a number of traditions well known throughout South America about a group of men in long, black, flowing gowns, with white skins and golden hair, who appeared rather like missionaries just before the deluge in about 11,000 BC.

The chief among these was known as Quetzalcoatl, and although later he was usually represented as being a god, he was in fact a holy man. He came, it was said, by way of a tunnel from an island to the east of Brazil. The Marquis de Nadaillac in his Pre-Historic America (1885) is intriguing on the subject: A singular fact in all the legends collected is the reported arrival of white and bearded strangers wearing black clothes, who have been absurdly identified as Buddhist missionaries . . . Of these strangers there is no certain information, all that is definitely alleged being that the chief was Quetzalcoatl or `the serpent covered with feathers’.

The first Spanish writers chose to see in Quetzalcoatl, St Thomas, who passed from India to America. Legends about him are numerous, and their variety justifies us in supposing that imaginary or real actions of several Maya and Nahua gods were attributed to him. (‘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.’ ) Harold Wilkins, however, is in no doubt where Quetzalcoatl came from or what his purpose was: `He came from Atlantean Brazil on a civilising mission to barbarian and savage Central America . . . warning also of destruction to come.’

Mr Wilkins then goes on to describe `the great catastrophe that sank Atlantis, the island-continent, into the depths of the ocean’. It was, he says, accompanied by simultaneous volcanic outbursts in America, Africa, and the chain of mountains of Central Asia, and far out in the Pacific. His description is so vivid I should like to quote it in full here: In the land of Hy-brazil and the dead cities into which the bandeiristas were to blunder, 10,000 years later, no day could be told from night. The skies were darkened. Up from the ground swirled dense clouds of thick ash and vapours, choking and mephitic, poisoning all round.

Terrific electric flashes rent the endless blackness, making it the more unearthly and darker. The maddened sea, in the mightier Maranon-Amazon gulf, rising like a thing demented, surged and roared in over the Amazon basin, dashing on the walled cities, with their massive breakwaters of stone. In the highlands of this great Atlantis colony – the new Atlantis of old America – it was the fire from heaven and the earth below that ruined them. When the earth shook, and day turned to night, in these dead cities of the unexplored Mato Grosso, of today, there came from great and bottomless crevasses in the ground, in the paved roads, by the side of their splendid temples and palaces, volumes of deadly gases.

Blinded, asphyxiated, maddened beyond human endurance, rendered insane by the appalling suddenness of the cosmic catastrophe, men and women, white-skinned, beautiful, some red-haired like Berenice the Golden, others fair and blonde as the Greek goddess Aphrodite, fled out of the cities, leaving all behind them. Parts of the cities sank into the ground, swallowed up by terrific earthquakes. Maybe great fires swept through some of the buildings; for the old bandeiristas were puzzled by the absence of the least vestige of furniture and utensils.

The great palaces and temples were shaken to their foundations. Those people of Atlantis Brazil who did not manage to escape into the surrounding mountains, along the splendidly paved roads, now cracked and fissured and overwhelmed by great boulders and rocks which the appalling earthquakes and torrential deluge had toppled from the peaks into the gorges, were either burnt and calcined, or engulfed in the yawning earth. What was not incinerated was destroyed by the wild beasts and birds of prey who, for many thousands of years to come, would inhabit alone these cities of old Hy-Brazil, swept by the besom of destruction. Wilkins, along with that other great expert on the ancient history of South America, Lewis Spence (vide his books The Problem of Atlantis, 1924, and The History of Atlantis, 1926), says that there were survivors of this terrible holocaust and that evidence of them has come to light from time to time over the intervening years. Stories of lost tribes of white people being seen in the jungles of Brazil . . . reports of strange, paleskinned guardians of secret cities in Peru and Guatemala . . .

All of them, apparently, descendants of the Atlanteans who colonized Brazil. For example, there are a little-known race of white Indians known as Los Patia who live in a settlement called, significantly, Atlan, in the dense forests between the Rio Apure and the Orinoco.

These people have an oral tradition about a cataclysm which destroyed their ancient Fatherland, in Brazil, and also a large island in the eastern ocean where dwelt `a rich and civilized race’- Atlantis, no doubt! Lewis Spence also tells us of one of the native Indian races of Brazil, the Tapuya, who he believes are the descendants of a white helot race who served the ancient Hy-Brazilian masterrace, and also fled with them from the deluge which engulfed Atlantis. He writes in The Problem of Atlantis: `These Tapuyas are fair as the English. They have small feet and hands, delicate features of great beauty, and white, golden and auburn hair. They were skilful workers in precious stones and wore diamonds and jade ornaments.’

I have, in the previous chapter, referred to the white Indians who have been reported guarding secret cities from intruders, so I perhaps need cite only one other instance of physical evidence of the Atlantis-South America connection before moving on to the more specific question of the underground passageways in Brazil. This interesting observation again comes from Harold Wilkins and is recorded in his Mysteries of Ancient South America: There is a tradition current in the mystic east and, perhaps, derived from Atlanteans who quitted their great motherland before the time of the terrible cataclysm, that the central cathedral temple of old Atlantis’s capital, the hill city, `Sardegon’, had a dome-shaped ceiling from which flamed a magnificent central sun of blazing gold.

The late inheritors of the remains of the civilization of the Atlantean imperial colony of Hy-Brazil, of South America, the Incas of Peru – Peru, as one has stated, being derived from a word (not found in the Quichua, or native Peruvian tongue) Vira, meaning the god of the sun – had a glorious sun of purest gold which shone with truly dazzling refulgence from the walls of Cuzco’s great temple of the Sun. It was there when the keels of Don Francisco Pizarro’s caravels and galleons touched the shallows of the Peruvian coast in AD 1530.

The very eye-balls of the beholder were pained by its scintillations. But when Pizarro’s conquistadores laid their bandits’ hands on this ancient civilization, as the Carian-Colloans had done before them in relation to what was left of the communities of the old, white, bearded Atlanteans of HyBrazil in the islands of Lake Titicaca, Peru, that glorious sun of gold vanished. For four centuries its whereabouts have remained a mystery, the close secret of one, or not more than two, of the Inca’s posterity.

Be sure, that there is living today, on one of the valleys of the Peruvian cordilleras, some Peruvian, little suspected by his fellows, who knows where this sun went to ground. Any study of the mysteries of Brazil, and in particular its lost race, and ancient, ruined cities, must invariably pay some attention to the famous exploration work of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867-1925), who has himself become the centre of an unexplained mystery. For he himself disappeared into the Mato Grosso in 1925 and has not been seen or heard of since. He is of particular interest to us here, because (a) the intention of his exploration was to find `the cradle of Brazilian civilization’ and (b) the theory has been advanced that he did not die in the jungle but found his way into one of the subterranean passages and has remained there ever since!

The facts of Colonel Fawcett’s exploration need only be mentioned in brief, because his younger son, Brian, has, of course, edited a fine account of the events in Exploration Fawcett (1953). At the time of his last expedition, Fawcett was already well known in South America for his work delineating frontiers in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil during the rubber boom. During these years he had become obsessed with the legend of a lost city somewhere in the Mato Grosso which was supposed to be inhabited by a highly civilized race of white people. (Indeed, before setting off on his expedition, he said simply: ‘I have but one object: to bare the mysteries that the jungle fastnesses of South America have concealed for so many centuries.

We are encouraged in our hope of finding the ruins of an ancient, white civilisation and the degenerate offspring of a once cultivated race.’) Fawcett was driven on by two particular facts – the first that there were known to be several incredibly old ruins in the jungles. `These amazing ruins of ancient cities are incomparably older than those in Egypt,’ he said. And, secondly, by the story told in a historical document unearthed in the archives in Rio de Janeiro which described the discovery of a lost civilization in the Mato Grosso in 1734. This document (which can still be seen today in the Biblioteca Nationale in Rio de Janeiro) records how a Portuguese expedition discovered a small passage in one of the mountains and, crawling through it, found the ruins of a city which had obviously been devastated by some huge upheaval. Treasure and gold coins were spilled about everywhere. The explorers were even more amazed to be confronted by two men with white skin and golden hair. As the Portuguese settled down to record their find, they dispatched a native runner back to Rio de Janeiro with news of their discovery.

The explorers, however, never returned to civilization and were never heard of again. The only solution that could be offered to solve their disappearance was that they had either been detained – or killed – by the strange white men . . . Before setting off on this fateful trip with his elder son, Jack, and their companion, Raleigh Rimell, Colonel Fawcett had made an intensive study of the lore and legends of Brazil. He had heard all about cities supposed to date back 60,000 years, all about white Indians with blue eyes, and all about the fabulous hoards of treasure waiting in the ruined cities. That he suspected they might be the remnants of the ancient Atlantean race was revealed in a letter he wrote to Lewis Spence in 1924. This same letter also highlighted a growing conviction that there was a link between the ancient people of South America and those on the other side of the Atlantic – for he had noticed a similarity between inscriptions found on porticoes and pillars on certain Brazilian ruins and those he had seen thirty years before on some ancient stonework in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)! Fawcett wrote to Lewis Spence:
I have good reason to know that these original [white Atlantean] people still remain in a degenerate state . . . They use script and also llamas, an animal associated with Andean heights above 10,000 feet, but in origin a low country, hybrid animal. Their still existing remains show the use of different coloured stones in the steps leading to temple buildings and a great deal of sculpture in demi-relief.

So it was in high spirits that the Fawcett party set off for the Mato Grosso. The Colonel left his friends convinced that he knew what he was looking for and where he was going to find it – but he denied them any precise details. Only one final message was forthcoming before the three men stepped into the unknown and created the legend which still surrounds them and their fate to this day. It consisted of just a few lines from Colonel Fawcett – but lines redolent with mystery and the suggestion they were on the verge of some amazing discovery:
If there is any attempt to send an expedition after us, to discover our fate or fortune – and we expect to be right away from civilisation for two or more years – for God’s sake, stop them! England has nothing to do with this quest. It is a matter for Brazil, entirely.
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. 1 desisted to investigate further because I heard that the, 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 Sao 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 fright 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….

The above is an excerpt from Chapter Nine of Alec Maclellan’s book: The Lost World of Agharti.