Page 50 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

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
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number of basic elements ...
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. However, until commercial airlines began
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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
skies and see beautiful and puzzling things that had hitherto been
hidden from them.

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