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  skill and technology than the etching of the straight lines. But how widely

  separated in time were the earlier and later artists?

  Scholars do not address themselves to this question. Instead they lump

  both cultures together as ‘the Nazcans’ and depict them as primitive

  tribesmen who unaccountably developed sophisticated techniques of

  artistic self-expression, and then vanished from the Peruvian scene, many

  hundreds of years before the appearance of their better-known

  successors, the Incas.

  How sophisticated were these Nazcan ‘primitives’? What kind of

  knowledge must they have possessed to inscribe their gigantic signatures

  on the plateau? It seems, for a start, that they were pretty good

  observational astronomers—at least according to Dr Phillis Pitluga, an

  astronomer with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. After making an

  intensive computer-aided study of stellar alignments at Nazca, she has

  concluded that the famous spider figure was devised as a terrestrial

  diagram of the giant constellation of Orion, and that the arrow-straight

  lines linked to the figure appear to have been set out to track through the

  ages the changing declinations of the three stars of Orion’s Belt.3

  The real significance of Dr Pitluga’s discovery will become apparent in

  3 Personal communications with Dr Pitluga.

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  due course. Meanwhile, let us note that the Nazca spider also accurately

  depicts a member of a known spider genus— Ricinulei.4 This, as it

  happens, is one of the rarest spider genera in the world, so rare indeed

  that it has only been found in remote and inaccessible parts of the

  Amazon rainforest.5 How did the supposedly primitive Nazcan artists

  travel so far from their homeland, crossing the formidable barrier of the

  Andes, to obtain a specimen? More to the point, why should they have

  wanted to do such a thing and how were they able to duplicate minute

  details of Ricinulei’s anatomy normally visible only under a microscope,6

  notably the reproductive organ positioned on the end of its extended

  right leg?

  Such mysteries multiply at Nazca and none of the designs, except

  perhaps the condor, really seems quite at home here. The whale and the

  monkey are, after all, as out of place in this desert environment as the

  Amazonian spider. A curious figure of a man, his right arm raised as

  though in greeting, heavy boots on his feet and round eyes staring

  owlishly forward, cannot be said to belong to any known era or culture.

  And other drawings depicting the human form are equally peculiar: their

  heads enclosed in halos of radiance, they do indeed look like visitors

  from another planet. Their sheer size is equally noteworthy and bizarre.

  The hummingbird is 165 feet long, the spider 150 feet long, the condor

  stretches nearly 400 feet from beak to tail-feathers (as does the pelican),

  and a lizard, whose tail is now divided by the Pan-American highway, is

  617 feet in length. Almost every design is executed on the same

  cyclopean scale and in the same difficult manner, by the careful

  contouring of a single continuous line.

  Similar attention to detail is to be found in the geometrical devices.

  Some of these take the form of straight lines more than five miles long,

  marching like Roman roads across the desert, dropping into dried-out

  river beds, surmounting rocky outcrops, and never once deviating from

  true.

  This kind of precision is hard, but not impossible, to explain in

  conventional commonsense terms. More puzzling by far are the

  zoomorphic figures. How could they have been so perfectly made when,

  without aircraft, their creators could not have checked the progress of

  their work by viewing it in its proper perspective? None of the designs is

  small enough to be seen from ground level, where they appear merely as

  a series of shapeless ruts in the desert. They show their true form only

  when seen from an altitude of several hundred feet. There is no elevation

  nearby that provides such a vantage point.

  4 Firm identification of the Nazca spider with Ricinulei was first made by Professor

  Gerald S. Hawkins. See Gerald S. Hawkins, Beyond Stonehenge, Arrow Books, London,

  1977, p. 143-4.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid., p. 144.

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  Linemakers, map-makers

  I’m flying over the lines, trying to make sense of it all.

  My pilot is Rodolfo Arias, lately of the Peruvian Airforce. After a career

  in jet fighters he finds the little Cessna slow and uninspiring and treats it

  like a taxi with wings. Once already we’ve been back to the airstrip at

  Nazca to remove a window so that my partner Santha can point her

  cameras vertically down at the alluring glyphs. Now we’re experimenting

  with the view from different altitudes. At a couple of hundred feet above

  the plain Ricinulei, the Amazonian spider, looks like he’s going to rear up

  and snatch us in his jaws. At 500 feet we can see several of the figures at

  once: a dog, a tree, a weird pair of hands, the condor, and some of the

  triangles and trapezoids. When we ascend to 1500 feet, the zoomorphs,

  hitherto predominant, are revealed merely as small scattered units

  surrounded by an astonishing scribble of vast geometric forms. These

  forms now look less like runways and more like pathways made by

  giants—pathways that crisscross the plateau in what seems at first a

  bewildering variety of shapes, angles and sizes.

  As the ground continues to recede, however, and as the widening

  perspective on the lines permits more of an eagle’s-eye view, I begin to

  wonder whether there might not after all be some method to the

  cuneiform slashes and scratches spread out below me. I am reminded of

  an observation made by Maria Reiche, the mathematician who has lived at

  Nazca and studied the lines since 1946. In her view

  The geometric drawings give the impression of a cipher-script in which the same

  words are sometimes written in huge letters, at another time in minute characters.

  There are line arrangements which appear in a great variety of size categories

  together with very similar shapes. All the drawings are composed of a certain

  number of basic elements ...7

  As the Cessna bumps and heaves across the heavens, I also remember it

  is no accident that the Nazca lines were only properly identified in the

  twentieth century, after the era of flight had begun. In the late sixteenth

  century a magistrate named Luis de Monzon was the first Spanish

  traveller to bring back eyewitness reports concerning these mysterious

  ‘marks on the desert’ and to collect the strange local traditions that

  linked them to the Viracochas.8 However, until commercial airlines began

  to operate regularly between Lima and Arequipa in the 1930s no one

  seems to have grasped that the largest piece of graphic art in the world

  lay here in southern Peru. It was the development of aviation that made

  the difference, giving men and women the godlike ability to take to the

  sk
ies and see beautiful and puzzling things that had hitherto been

  hidden from them.

  7 Maria Reiche, Mystery on the Desert, Nazca, Peru, 1989, p. 58.

  8 Luis de Monzon was the corregidor, or magistrate, of Rucanas and Soras, near Nazca,

  in 1586. Pathways to the Gods, p. 36; Atlas of Mysterious Places, p. 100.

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  Rodolfo is steering the Cessna in a gentle circle over the figure of the

  monkey—a big monkey tied in a riddle of geometric forms. It’s not easy

  to describe the eerie, hypnotic feeling this design gives me: it’s very

  complicated and absorbing to look at, and slightly sinister in an abstract,

  indefinable way. The monkey’s body is defined by a continuous unbroken

  line. And, without ever being interrupted, this same line winds up stairs,

  over pyramids, into a series of zig-zags, through a spiral labyrinth (the

  tail), and then back around a number of star-like hairpin bends. It would

  be a real tour de force of draughtsmanship and artistic skill on a sheet of

  notepaper, but this is the Nazca desert (where they do things on a grand

  scale) and the monkey is at least 400 feet long and 300 feet wide ...

  Were the linemakers map-makers too?

  And why were they called the Viracochas?

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  Chapter 5

  The Inca Trail to the Past

  No artefacts or monuments, no cities or temples, have endured in

  recognizable form for longer than the most resilient religious traditions.

  Whether expressed in the Pyramid Texts of Ancient Egypt, or the Hebrew

  Bible, or the Vedas, such traditions are among the most imperishable of

  all human creations: they are vehicles of knowledge voyaging through

  time.

  The last custodians of the ancient religious heritage of Peru were the

  Incas, whose beliefs and ‘idolatry’ were ‘extirpated’ and whose treasures

  were ransacked during the thirty terrible years that followed the Spanish

  conquest in AD 1532.1 Providentially, however, a number of early Spanish

  travellers made sincere efforts to document Inca traditions before they

  were entirely forgotten.

  Though little attention was paid at the time, some of these traditions

  speak strikingly of a great civilization that was believed to have existed in

  Peru many thousands of years earlier.2 Powerful memories were preserved

  of this civilization, said to have been founded by the Viracochas, the

  same mysterious beings credited with the making of the Nazca lines.

  ‘Foam of the Sea’

  When the Spanish conquistadores arrived, the Inca empire extended along

  the Pacific coast and Andean highlands of South America from the

  northern border of modern Ecuador, through the whole of Peru, and as

  far south as the Maule River in central Chile. Connecting the far-flung

  corners of this empire was a vast and sophisticated road system: two

  parallel north-south highways, for example, one running for 3600

  kilometres along the coast and the other for a similar distance through

  the Andes. Both these great thoroughfares were paved and connected by

  frequent links. In addition, they exhibited an interesting range of design

  and engineering features such as suspension bridges and tunnels cut

  through solid rock. They were clearly the work of an evolved, disciplined

  and ambitious society. Ironically, they played a significant part in its

  downfall: the Spanish forces, led by Francisco Pizarro, used them to great

  1 See, for example, Father Pablo Joseph, The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru (translated

  from the Spanish by L. Clark Keating), University of Kentucky Press, 1968.

  2 This is the view of Fernando Montesinos, expressed in his Memorias Antiguas

  Historiales del Peru (written in the seventeenth century). English edition translated and

  edited by P. A. Means, Hakluyt Society, London, 1920.

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  effect to speed up their ruthless advance into the Inca heartland.3

  The capital of the Inca empire was the city of Cuzco, a name meaning

  ‘the earth’s navel’ in the local Quechua language.4 According to legend it

  was established by Manco Capac and Mama Occlo, two children of the

  Sun. Here, though the Incas worshipped the sun god, whom they knew as

  Inti, quite another deity was venerated as the Most Holy of all. This was

  Viracocha, whose namesakes were said to “have made the Nazca lines

  and whose own name meant ‘Foam of the Sea.’5

  No doubt it is just a coincidence that the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who

  was born of the sea, received her name because of ‘the foam [ aphros] out

  of which she was formed’.6 Besides, Viracocha was always depicted

  uncompromisingly as a male by the peoples of the Andes. That much

  about him is known for certain. No historian, however, is able to say how

  ancient was the cult of this deity before the Spanish arrived to put a stop

  to it. This is because the cult seemed always to have been around;

  indeed, long before the Incas incorporated him into their cosmogony and

  built a magnificent temple for him at Cuzco, the evidence suggests that

  the high god Viracocha had been worshipped by all the civilizations that

  had ever existed in the long history of Peru.

  Citadel of Viracocha

  A few days after leaving Nazca, Santha and I arrived in Cuzco and made

  our way to the site of the Coricancha, the great temple dedicated to

  Viracocha in the pre-Colombian era. The Coricancha was of course long

  gone. Or, to be more exact, it was not so much gone as buried beneath

  layers of later architecture. The Spanish had kept its superb Inca

  foundations, and the lower parts of its fabulously strong walls, and had

  erected their own grandiose colonial cathedral on top.

  Walking towards the front entrance of this cathedral, I remembered that

  the Inca temple that had once stood here had been covered with more

  than 700 sheets of pure gold (each weighing around two kilograms) and

  that its spacious courtyard had been planted with ‘fields’ of replica corn

  also fashioned out of gold.7 I could not help but be reminded of

  Solomon’s temple in far-off Jerusalem, also reputed to have been adorned

  3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 6:276-7.

  4 Paul Devereux, Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places, Blandford Books, London, 1992,

  p. 76. See also Peru, Lonely Planet Publications, Hawthorne, Australia, 1991, p. 168.

  5 The Facts on File Encyclopaedia of World Mythology and Legend, London and Oxford,

  1988, p. 657.

  6 Macrobius, cited in Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, David

  R. Godine, Publisher, Boston, 1992, p. 134. See also A. R. Hope Moncreiff, The

  Illustrated Guide to Classical Mythology, BCA, London, 1992, p. 153.

  7 Peru, p. 181.

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  with sheets of gold and a marvellous orchard of golden trees.8

  Earthquakes in 1650 and again in 1950 had largely demolished the

  Spanish cathedral of Santo Domingo which stood on the site of the

  temple of Viracocha, and it had been necessary to rebuild it on both
r />
  occasions. Its Inca foundations and lower walls survived these natural

  disasters intact, thanks to their characteristic design which made use of

  an elegant system of interlocking polygonal blocks. These blocks, and the

  general layout of the place, were almost all that was now left of the

  original structure, apart from an octagonal grey stone platform at the

  centre of the vast rectangular courtyard which had once been covered

  with 55 kilograms of solid gold.9 On either side of the courtyard were

  ante-chambers, also from the Inca temple, with refined architectural

  features such as walls that tapered upwards and beautifully-carved niches

  hewn out of single pieces of granite.

  We took a walk through the narrow, cobbled streets of Cuzco. Looking

  around, I realized it was not just the cathedral that reflected Spanish

  imposition on top of an earlier culture: the whole town was slightly

  schizophrenic. Spacious, balconied, pastel-shaded colonial homes and

  palaces towered above me but almost all of them stood on Inca

  foundations or incorporated complete Inca structures of the same

  beautiful polygonal architecture used in the Coricancha. In one alleyway,

  known as Hatunrumiyoc, I paused to examine an intricate jigsaw puzzle

  of a wall made of countless drystone blocks all perfectly fitted together,

  all of different sizes and shapes, interlocking in a bewildering array of

  angles. The carving of the individual blocks, and their arrangement into

  so complicated a structure could only have been achieved by master

  craftsmen possessed of very high levels of skill, with untold centuries of

  architectural experimentation behind them. On one block I counted

  twelve angles and sides in a single plane, and I could not slip even the

  edge of a piece of thin paper into the joints that connected it to the

  surrounding blocks.

  The bearded stranger

  It seemed that in the early sixteenth century, before the Spanish began to

  demolish Peruvian culture in earnest, an idol of Viracocha had stood in

  the Holy of Holies of the Coricancha. According to a contemporary text,

  the Relacion anonyma de los costumbres antiguos de los naturales del

  Piru, this idol took the form of a marble statue of the god—a statue

  described ‘as to the hair, complexion, features, raiment and sandals, just

  8 Tan. Terumah, XI; also, with slight variations, Yoma 39b. Cited in The Jewish