Page 78 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

... Each straw was placed with maximum precision to achieve perfect symmetry
and streamlined elegance, while the bundles were so tightly lashed that they
looked like ... gilded logs bent into a clog-shaped peak fore and aft.
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The reed boats of the ancient Nile, and the reed boats of Lake Titicaca
(the original design of which, local Indians insisted, had been given to
them by ‘the Viracocha people’ ), had other points in common. Both, for
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example, were equipped with sails mounted on peculiar two-legged
straddled masts. Both had also been used for the long-distance transport
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of exceptionally heavy building materials: obelisks and gargantuan blocks
of stone bound for the temples at Giza and Luxor and Abydos on the one
hand and for the mysterious edifices of Tiahuanaco on the other.
In those far-off days, before Lake Titicaca became more than one
hundred feet shallower, Tiahuanaco had stood at the water’s edge
overlooking a vista of awesome and sacred beauty. Now the great port,
capital city of Viracocha himself, lay lost amid eroded hills and empty
windswept plains.

Road to Tiahuanaco ...

After returning from Suriqui to the mainland we drove our hired jeep
across those plains, raising a cloud of dust. Our route took us through
the towns of Puccarani and Laha, populated by stolid Aymara Indians who
walked slowly in the narrow cobbled streets and sat placidly in the little
sunlit plazas.
Were these people the descendants of the builders of Tiahuanaco, as
the scholars insisted? Or were the legends right? Had the ancient city
been the work of foreigners with godlike powers who had settled here,
long ages ago?

6 Thor Heyerdahl, The Ra Expeditions, Book Club Associates, London, 1972, pp. 43, 295.
7 Ibid., p. 43.
Ibid., p. 295.
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