Page 49 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

due course. Meanwhile, let us note that the Nazca spider also accurately
depicts a member of a known spider genus—Ricinulei. This, as it
4
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. How did the supposedly primitive Nazcan artists
5
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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