Trail of Feathers (10 page)

The more I pondered it, the more obvious it seemed that the Lines weren’t designed to be seen by the eyes of men at all. They must have been intended for the gods, and the gods alone. Why else would they have been so vast? Maybe that was the whole point. They were drawn so large as to be invisible to mortals. It reminded me of a famous Guy de Maupassant anecdote. The author ate lunch every day in the restaurant halfway up the Eiffel Tower, although he was well-known for despising it. When asked why he did so, he replied that it was the only place in Paris where he could not see the damned
Tour d’Eiffel
.

Perhaps the sheer enormity of the Nazca figures obliterated them from sight in the same way. As for a method of drawing accurately an image which is more than a hundred metres in width, I didn’t see how being above the
pampa
would help the designers in the least. Surely a basic form of
Sketch-a-graph
, or a string and a stick, would be the only tool necessary to map out the cryptic Lines.

*

The best thing about Nazca was the hardware shops. As dusk fell over the town I stumbled on a row of them, tucked away near the bus station. Not since East Africa had I seen such a varied stock of Chinese-made goods: hand-grinders for mincing beef, liquorice and loo seats; sticks of school chalk, and coal tar soap, nail clippers, fountain pens, and cheap rubber bands. The owner of one such shop was called Pepé. He was a great bear of a man with a pot-belly, a grease-stained shirt, and a week’s worth of stubble on his cheeks. His face was dominated by a pair of drooping eyes. When I entered, he was squinting at a newspaper in the faint light of a low-watt bulb. As soon as he saw me he jumped up, dusted off a stool and beckoned me to sit.

‘Esta usted bienvenido
, you are very welcome, Senor,’ he said, clapping his hands together. It is wonderful to have you here!’

I thanked him for his reception.

‘Que
alegna!’
he called, ‘your arrival calls for celebration!’

Pepé bent down behind the counter and pulled out a scruffy shoebox. He withdrew the lid, the tip of his tongue clamped between his lips. I leaned forward to see what was in the box. It was a light-bulb. The shopkeeper unscrewed the low-watt bulb and replaced it with the one from the box. The room was filled with an abundance of creamy yellow light.

‘I keep it for special occasions,’ lisped Pepé.

In the bright light I scanned the shelves.

‘This is nothing but rubbish,’ he huffed. ‘It’s a terrible shop. I forbid you to buy anything. How could such a fine man be expected to buy such rubbish?’

He handed me a mug of tea.

‘Hungry, are you?’

I said that I was not.

‘Go on,’ Pepé replied. ‘I always have a snack around this time.’ He called loudly for his son.

The child’s feet could be heard behind the counter. He appeared a moment later with a plate of crackers.

I took one of the biscuits. Pepé pointed to a small glass bottle filled with what looked like salt.

‘Gone on, have some’ he said. ‘It’s magic’

The boy sprinkled a few grains of the mysterious powder onto my biscuit. I took a bite. It tasted savoury.

‘We put it on everything’ said the shopkeeper grandly.

‘What
is
it?’

‘Ajinomoto
- it’s monosodium glutimate.’

With three of the crackers inside me, I was converted. It was great stuff. You just had to think of roast beef, meat loaf or a nice rack of lamb, and it was as if you were tasting it. Despite Pepé’s protestations I bought two bottles of the food enhancer, certain that they’d come in useful somewhere down the line.

The shopkeeper asked me what I thought of Nazca. I said how lucky the people were to have the Lines.

‘You’re right’ he replied. ‘Everyone for miles around is jealous.’ 

‘You couldn’t wish for a better tourist trap’ I said. 

The shopkeeper scratched his stubble again.

‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘There’s much better stuff than the Lines.’ ‘What could be more popular with tourists than the Nazca Lines?’
‘Las momias
, mummies,’ said Pepé. ‘Got thousands of them. We’ve hardly even started with them yet.’

One of the highlights of the Hummingbird Package was a quick stop at the infamous
Cementerio de Chauchilla
, not far from Nazca. A guide whistled for the driver to stop. He beckoned us to follow him to the graves. This pre-Incan burial ground, marooned in the middle of the desert, is marked by a tattered tin sign. It’s a bleak attempt at tourism. Along with a dozen Germans - retired workers from a ballbearing factory in Dusseldorf - I tramped from grave to grave. Forty or fifty funeral pits had been excavated, looted long ago by
huaqueros
, grave-robbers. All valuables had been expertly stripped away: jewellery and trinkets, pottery, seashells and funerary shawls. The remains were gruesome by any standards.

Propped up in each pit were a couple of mummified figures, huddled against a wall, knees pushed up against their chins; ragged clothing bundled around them, half-peeled away. Their skin had been seared off by the sun, hanging in patches off the bleached bones. Lower jaws were drooping, eye sockets empty, teeth knocked out, hair matted, and facial features awry, like cadavers from a low-budget horror film.

The German cameras clicked, as the guide pointed out the details.

‘Look at that one,’ he said. ‘See how its skull is deformed.’

We peered down into the grave. He was right. The head was unusually long, like comic book sketches of a ‘small grey’ alien. Cranial deformations were once popular with the ancient Nazca and Paracas civilisations. They’re so strange that you find a smile creeping over your lips, as if someone’s having you on. The brow is high, leading back to an elongated swathe of skull. Some scholars say the crania were deformed in childhood, in the name of beauty. Others contend that the technique relieved migraines, cured insanity, or may even have been used as a punishment. A pair of boards would be bound tightly to either side of the head, pressing it out of shape.

Working in the 1920s, the celebrated Peruvian archaeologist Julio C Tello made a special study of the deformed skulls. His work led to a 1929 law, making grave-robbing a national crime. Credited with the first major archaeological finds near Nazca, he claimed to have found babies which still had the deforming boards bound to their heads.

When the Hummingbird bus had screeched back into town, I dropped in to Pepé’s shop before dinner. The room was dim, lit again by the low-watt bulb. The shopkeeper was hunched over the counter, struggling with a ledger. He seemed depressed.

Is everything all right?’

Pepé looked up. His bloodhound eyes drooping behind a pair of plastic frames.

‘I can’t sleep,’ he said. ‘And my head aches as if a great stone’s pressing down. Worst of all is that the numbers never add up.’

The shopkeeper pointed to the page of sums.

‘For twenty years,’ he went on, ‘Nazca has boomed. Anything which opens here succeeds. The town’s got more rich people than I can count. Look at that Senor Rodriguez with his dammed Hummingbird Tours. He must be in league with the Devil.’

I vouched for the Hummingbird experience.

‘Why am I the only man in Nazca whose business does so badly?’ moaned Pepé.

I peered once again at the shelves of his shop. They were crammed with useful stuff, and the prices were reasonable. ‘I’ll tell you why things are so bad,’ he winced.

‘Why?’

The old shopkeeper ran a Biro across the furrows of his brow. 

‘Susto’,
he said.

I’d come across
susto
in Latin America before. Part curse and part superstition, it’s a regional obsession, which translates literally as ‘fright’. Thousands put their misfortune down to it.
Susto
has all the hallmarks of an eastern superstition. I often used to wonder if, like the Evil Eye, it had been brought from North Africa via medieval Spain.

An unexpected bang, a loud noise, or a jerk to the head are all that’s needed. Some say it’s the reason why Peruvian babies are swaddled tightly for so long. The imagined effect of
susto
is thought to prise the spirit and the body apart.

‘How did the
susto
find you?’ I queried.

The shopkeeper glanced down at the floor.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I spend all my time sitting here trying to remember; and the more I think about it, the more the
susto
bites’

Most conversations with Pepé involved talk of
susto
, and invariably ended in the same subject - mummies. He saw the preserved bodies as the real future of Nazca. The Lines, he said, were a mere distraction. Mummies were different. They held answers to all the questions. If only he could rid himself of the
susto
, he was sure that the mummies would bring him fame and fortune.

'Out there,’ he said, ‘the
pampa
is littered with graves. Most of them are undisturbed. Why bother with the desert symbols when you’ve got the actual people who drew the Nazca Lines? I don’t know why those stupid scientists keep coming up with new theories, when they could study the mummies.’

Pepé had a point. He leant back in his chair, his mind momentarily drawn away from
susto
. I told him about my Hummingbird trip to the burial ground at Chauchilla. The Germans and I, I said, had been impressed. Propelling his fist down on the counter like a hammer, he scoffed.

‘That’s nothing! Chauchilla’s a child’s playground. Wait till you see Majuelo!’ 

‘Where’s that?’

‘Across the
pampa
, far from Nazca.’ 

‘Can I go there?’

The old shopkeeper hugged his arms around his chest.
‘

Es un lugar peligroso
, it’s a dangerous place,’ he said firmly.
‘Mucho susto
, many frights.’

Were it not for the occasional swoop of a Cessna in the sky above, Nazca’s desert would have been silent. Sightseeing tours, a recent disturbance in a sea of tranquillity, come and go as the Nazca mystery is touted to another coachload of foreign tourists. I found it ironic that most Nazcans had never seen the Lines from the air; few could have afforded the flight. But most had no interest anyway in what they considered merely to be tourist bait. In Nazca, everyone was praying for the same thing: that the tourists would keep coming, and that it didn’t rain. One man told me that if it rained for more than two hours the Lines would be washed away.

I set off early in the morning to cross the pampa. At the wheel of the tired old hatchback was Pepé’s eldest son, José-Luis. A Marlboro Man in the making, he had the greased back mop of hair, the fake Ray Bans, and had already mastered the wink. José-Luis agreed to take me to the vast burial ground at Majuelo if I’d tell him all I knew about English girls. He had heard, he said, that they favoured white handbags, which they danced around at the discotheque.

We veered left, off the Pan-American Highway, down the only route which crosses the Nazca Lines. The even sound of rubber on tarmac was replaced by a grating noise, as the tyres cut into the basalt. The car filled with dust. On either side of the track the level planes stretched out like contours of the moon.

As the hatchback jarred along, I thought about Pepé’s obsession with mummies. Although morbid, it wasn’t an unknown preoccupation. The shopkeeper had been right - you can learn a great deal from preserved bodies. But there’s more to mummies than meets the eye. Pepé was probably unaware of the West’s own fixation with mummies. We have all but forgotten their historical role in European medicine. For centuries nothing was regarded as more powerful a physic than powdered mummy. It was credited with curing all kinds of ailments, including rashes and migraine, palpitations, epilepsy and plague. Throughout the Middle Ages, European aristocrats would tuck a sachet of mummy powder into their sleeve. Any sign of malady, they’d guzzle the contents down. Even as recently as 1908, the German drugs company E. Merck were advertising ‘Genuine Egyptian Mummy, as long as supplies last, 17 Marks per kilogram’.

Forty minutes after turning off the desert highway, we descended onto what looked like a parched riverbed. The banks were caked in dry compressed mud, as if the river had raged there only days before. But water couldn’t have run in that channel for centuries. We ploughed ahead, José-Luis driving at high speed like a getaway driver. He told me of his big plans - his dream was to open a hotel and bar. He’d buy a fleet of planes, he said, and give Senor Rodriguez some competition. Then the English girls with white handbags would be all over him.

He guided the hatchback down an embankment and through a copse of warango trees. Beyond them was a farmstead. We left the car at a distance, and walked towards the low adobe buildings. A dog voiced our arrival from the shade. The campesino and his wife didn’t need the dog’s alarm. They had spotted our trail of dust long before. Emerging gingerly from behind a fence made from the branches of a thorn tree, they came to greet their visitors.

The harsh desert existence had taken a dreadful toll. The man’s face was chapped like rawhide, its skin blistered from a life spent working in the open. The woman, too, was wizened long before her time. I learnt later that she was forty-eight. She looked more like eighty. A decade of pregnancy had stolen her youth. She had given birth to twelve children, five of whom were dead.

José-Luis called out his name.

‘¡Amigo!’ cried the farmer. ‘My friend! ¿Cómo esta su padre? How’s your father?’ Pepé was well, he said, despite his bad luck. 

‘¿Sustol’ asked the farmer. 

José-Luis nodded.

We were ushered inside, out of the sun.

The farmer, Juan, pulled a plastic sheet away from the best chair. Wiping away a residue of dust, he motioned me to sit. The heat made conversation almost too much work. I admired a poster of Princess Diana, pinned up on the cracked mud wall.

‘Ah, she was beautiful,’ said the farmer softly.

‘God takes what He loves most,’ whispered his wife.