Page 45 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 4

Flight of the Condor

I’m in southern Peru, flying over the Nazca lines.
Below me, after the whale and the monkey, the hummingbird comes
into view, flutters and unfolds her wings, stretches forward her delicate
beak towards some imaginary flower. Then we turn hard right, pursued
by our own tiny shadow as we cross the bleak scar of the Pan-American
highway, and follow a trajectory that brings us over the fabulous snake-
necked ‘Alcatraz’: a heron 900 feet long conceived in the mind of a
master geometer. We circle around, cross the highway for a second time,
pass an astonishing arrangement of fish and triangles laid out beside a
pelican, turn left and find ourselves floating over the sublime image of a
giant condor with feathers extended in stylized flight.
Just as I try to catch my breath, another condor almost close enough to
touch materializes out of nowhere, a real condor this time, haughty as a
fallen angel riding a thermal back to heaven. My pilot gasps and tries to
follow him. For a moment I catch a glimpse of a bright, dispassionate eye
that seems to weigh us up and find us wanting. Then, like a vision from
some ancient myth, the creature banks and glides contemptuously
backwards into the sun leaving our single-engined Cessna floundering in
the lower air.
Below us now there’s a pair of parallel lines almost two miles long,
arrow straight all the way to vanishing point. And there, off to the right, a
series of abstract shapes on a scale so vast—and yet so precisely
executed—that it seems inconceivable they could have been the work of
men.
The people around here say that they were not the work of men, but of
demigods, the Viracochas, who also left their fingerprints elsewhere in
1
the Andean region many thousands of years ago.

The riddle of the lines

The Nazca plateau in southern Peru is a desolate place, sere and
unwelcoming, barren and profitless. Human populations have never
concentrated here, nor will they do so in the future: the surface of the
moon seems hardly less hospitable.
If you happen to be an artist with grand designs, however, these high

Tony Morrison with Professor Gerald S. Hawkins, Pathways to the Gods, Book Club
1
Associates, London, 1979, p. 21. See also The Atlas of Mysterious Places, (ed. Jennifer
Westwood), Guild Publishing, London, 1987, p. 100.

43