Trail of Feathers (9 page)

Ten minutes later we were pulling into the drive of a spacious wooden house, encircled by a fence of tall cacti. Before I could get out of the car, an elderly man came out to greet me. It was Carlos.

A pair of bifocals balanced on his nose, magnifying his teal-coloured eyes. He must have been over seventy, but had a youthful energy. His face was refined, edged by un wrinkled cheeks and an angular jaw. A bald patch at his crown was expertly concealed by a wave of oyster-grey hair. Like Fernando, whom he appeared to treat as an adopted son, Carlos spoke good English.

He led me into the house. The panelled walls of the sitting-room were adorned with images of Juanita, the local girl turned ice maiden. They showed her in all her finery, wrapped in a funeral cloak, a mouthful of jumbled teeth leering from her noseless face. But Juanita was just one of so many distractions. The walls and bookshelves, tabletops and bureaux were cluttered with mementos. There were framed letters and leather-bound books, a Confederate flag on a stand, a pair of duelling pistols, and six Samurai swords on a rack. One entire wall was taken up with an 18th-century map of Paris, and on another, were a dozen etchings of West African warriors in towering Dogon masks.

Over the fireplace was hung a large section of scarlet textile. The size of a pillowcase, it depicted the now-familiar forms of pre-Incan Birdmen.

It’s from the necropolis near Nazca,’ said Carlos, noticing my interest.

I said that I had come to Peru in search of the Birdmen, but was doubting whether they existed at all.

‘Mankind understood the principles of gliding centuries ago,’ he replied. ‘But, incredibly, it took him so long to design a flying wing.’

‘They say it began in the 19th century … Otto Lilienthal, the Wright brothers and all that.’

Carlos rubbed his hands together.

‘Do you believe that?’ he said. ‘Do you really believe that man was so slow to master something so simple?’

Fernando went out to wash his car.

‘What do you know about kites?’ Carlos asked me.

‘That they’ve been used in China for three thousand years,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said Carlos. ‘They show that man has understood aerial dynamics for centuries. A general in Han Dynasty China flew a flock of musical kites over an enemy encampment the night before a great battle,’ he said. ‘Attached to each kite was a whistle. Thinking the sounds were the voices of angels warning them to run for their lives, the enemy fled.’

‘But a kite is just a kite,’ I said. ‘It’s far too flimsy to carry a man.’ ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Carlos declared. ‘What about Alexander Graham Bell’s manned kite,
Cygnet
2
’
I hunched my shoulders.

‘It was forty feet long,’ he said. ‘Piloted by an army soldier, it flew for seven minutes … that was in 1907.’

Carlos tugged off his bifocals and dabbed his eyes with the corner of his shirt.

‘Since my wife died’ he said, leading me to a shed behind the house, I've been tinkering’

The workshop was in a dreadful state. Wood-shavings, newspapers and tools were scattered about. Carlos flicked on the light. Taking up most of the floor was a wooden framework. I looked it over carefully, making out the single broad wing, and the substructure.

It reminded me of the boy at my boarding school who built an aeroplane in the woodwork shop. He used to taxi around the grounds in it in his spare time. Everyone was so used to him trundling about the perimeter of the playing fields that they hardly took any notice. One Saturday afternoon, during a rugby match with another school, a freak gust of wind thrust the fragile craft skyward. The first fifteen watched as it ascended, higher and higher. At five hundred feet it levelled off. Then it nose-dived to Earth. The boy was rushed to hospital, and survived, but his plane disintegrated on impact.

There’s another six months to go’ said Carlos, ‘but you get the general idea.’

‘A hang-glider?’

‘Exactly, or if you like, it’s a kite without strings. I’ve based the project on the Colditz principle.’ ‘What’s that?’

Carlos ran his hand over the balsa frame.

‘You probably know of the glider built at Colditz during the War.’ I said that I did.

‘Then you must know that its designers used the simplest materials - cloth and wood, nothing fancy.’ Carlos led me back to the house. ‘I’m not saying this is what the Incas glided with’ he mused. ‘But I
am
saying they were advanced enough to have worked it out.’

Like the boy at my school who’d built a plane, Carlos was charged with great enthusiasm for the project. But he had not yet been injured. He was sure that the Incas had a basic knowledge of gliding, citing the existence of the Nazca Lines as certain proof.

‘Go to Nazca and walk on the
pampa’
he said. ‘As you walk, look at the ground, and look at the air. Understand the feebleness of man, and sense the spirit which keeps the birds above you aloft.’

Nazca is a one-horse town set on the edge of the Pan-American Highway. It is encircled by the Atacama, one of the Earth’s driest deserts. The ground is pancake flat, the dust so fine that it burns your throat and blinds your eyes. You might expect tumbleweed to blow down the main street, or a gunfight at the local bar, because this is Peru’s Wild West.

The men are rough and tough. They talk big, drink hard, and walk as if they’re wearing spurs - every man in Nazca is a Marlboro Man. As they swagger about, leaning back into their boots, you get the feeling that the locals realise their luck. And it is luck, the kind which wins lotteries. Every man, woman and child in town is touched by it - a miraculous stroke of fortune.

Imagine that for centuries your ancestors cursed God for a land so parched that crops wouldn’t grow. One generation after the next choked on the dust, and yearned to escape. They lived in a place where travellers never stopped; where there were no proper buildings or money for schools. But then, quite by chance, a discovery was made, which flipped fortune’s coin from bad luck to bonanza. Busloads of tourists started to arrive day and night. They wanted hotels and bars, restaurants, internet cafés and guides. Best of all, they were willing to pay.

The Nazca Lines are one of the world’s great unexplained phenomena. The only certainty is that they’re out there: a series of immense figures and geometric shapes etched into the desert’s delicate face. They are so immense that they can only be seen from the air. Some are outlandish geometric shapes, deciphered as animals -among them a monkey, a whale, a dog, and a spider. But the most sensational figures at Nazca are the birds. More detailed and numerous than the others, they include an albatross, a parrot, a condor and a hummingbird.

The pilot who first noticed them as he flew over Nazca in the ‘30s, had no idea what he'd discovered. Within years, a barrage of crackpot scientists, mathematicians and free-thinking hippies arrived. For every visitor, there was a new theory. Virtually everything you hear about Nazca is speculation.

The first theorists were remarkably controlled. They said it must have taken a thousand years for the Lines to be etched into the dust; that the procedure had begun four centuries before the birth of Christ. But as time passed, imaginations ran wild. The Lines, they now said, were ancient running tracks, a map of the heavens, a calendar of the seasons, a code to fertility rites, irrigation channels, or patterns for weaving yarn. Those in the theory business know full well that the wackier their idea, the more publicity they’ll get. Perhaps that’s what inspired the young German, Erich von Daniken, who appeared on the scene in 1968. His idea was that the Nazca Lines were high-tech’ landing strips, left by extraterrestrials.

*

An eager lady with sallow cheeks and a walnut-whip of grey hair, greeted me to Hotel Hummingbird, located just off Calle Lima. She pranced up and down the reception area, a stout body on nimble feet. Her name was Florence. What good luck it was, she said, that I’d not been trapped by one of the town’s many touts.

‘They eat you alive, like piranhas!’ she exclaimed, gnashing her dentures.

Before I could protest, Florence had signed me up for the Hummingbird Package. Squaring a stack of vouchers in her hands, she leant over the counter and ran a sharp fingernail down my shirt-front.

‘The Hummingbird is for lovers,’ she said.

‘But I’m alone,’ I replied, realising the impropriety of the remark. Florence coughed with enthusiasm, and pressed her teeth back into position with her thumb. 

‘Maybe I’ll see you later,’ she said, handing me the key. 

‘What are all these vouchers for?’

Florence flicked through them like a croupier shuffling cards. ‘For the Hummingbird suite, a meal in Hummingbird restaurant, a cocktail in the Hummingbird bar, use of Hummingbird’s internet, the Hummingbird city tour, the Hummingbird laundry and discotheque and swimming pool, access to the Hummingbird museum and tourist kiosk, the Hummingbird viewpoint, the Hummingbird bus service, and’ Florence waved the last coupon, ‘for the flight over the Nazca Lines on Hummingbird Airlines.’

I handed over an obscene amount of foreign currency to cover the deluxe Hummingbird Package. Despite my bitterness, I couldn’t fault the hotel owner’s talent for business. He was cleaning up nicely. It was hard to imagine what he’d think of next. Florence twisted a nail round a long grey curl at the edge of her face.

‘Next week we open Hummingbird karaoke’ she said.

*

The Hummingbird bus dropped me at a small airport, not far from the town centre. Wherever I looked, I saw smooth young men. They all had the same denim jackets, Italian sunglasses and wetted-down hair. Some were selling souvenirs and baseball caps; others were too cool to work.

As he took my voucher for the Hummingbird flight, a, teenage Marlboro Man clicked his fingers at my chest and pointed to the righthand seat of a single-prop’ Cessna 172. I scrambled up into the cockpit. The pilot handed me a photocopied map of the Lines. In a single movement, he slipped on a pair of Ray Bans, slicked back his hair, and pushed in the throttle.

At seventeen, I’d somehow managed to talk my parents into sending me to flight school. A pilot’s training, I had assured them, would surely come in useful in years to come. An ultra-relaxed Norwegian had taught me to fly small, high-wing Cessnas. Scanning the controls brought back distinct memories. I’d been an unaccomplished pilot, and had spent most of the time out of control over Florida’s Panhandle.

Soon we were lifting steeply into the sky, flying north-west towards the
pampa
. The late morning air was choppy, churning with thermals. Down below, the brilliant sunlight played on the sands, accentuating every ditch, every furrow. The black basalt crust of stones, which so reminded me of Iraq’s western desert, stretched from one horizon to the other. Ancient dried riverbeds were quite clear, following the undulations, giving chaos to what was otherwise uniform.

The first image we saw was a whale. The pilot banked into a steep turn. Then on the left were trapezoids, and on the right the ‘astronaut’. Another turn, and a giant pair of human hands, a dog, and a tree. Every few seconds the pilot would wrench back the column and roll the small plane into another turn. I shouted against the thunderous noise of the engine, asking him to go easy. Banking hard to the right, he pointed out of the window. On the flattened desert floor, its beak pointing south, was the image of a condor. And, a moment later,
el colibri
, the hummingbird.

Engraved into the basalt surface, the hummingbird was poised at the edge of a low plateau. Its wings, tail and elongated beak were unmistakable. As I gazed down at the figure, the aircraft surging from side to side, my mind ran free. How and why could such an exquisite symbol have ever been drawn?

Not long after Von Daniken had been to Nazca, an American called Jim Woodman arrived. The year was 1973. Having studied ritual smoke balloons, which are still flown in Guatemala, Woodman began to put together his own theory. The Quechua language, he noted, has a word for a ‘balloon-maker’. He had discovered fragments of local pottery, too, which showed the crude image of what he said was a balloon. Woodman saw textiles taken from graves at the village of Cahuachi, not far from Nazca. The weave was impressive (185 × 95 threads per square inch): surprisingly tight considering they were 1500 years old. Woodman felt certain the ancient man had flown at Nazca. A lighter-than-air method was the only way, he said, that would explain the Lines. He asserted that by flying high above the
pampa
, the designers could have mapped out the shapes to scale before etching them.

Like so many before him, Woodman set out to prove his theory.

He put together a team of engineers and aviation specialists. They designed and built
Condor I
, an enormous tetrahedron balloon. The gondola was made from
totora
reeds from Lake Titicaca; the woven envelope had a capacity of 80,000 cubic feet. But instead of air, it was filled with smoke. Dotted on the
pampa
, Woodman’s team had found the remnants of what they thought were burning pits. These, they said, were used to fill the ancient balloons with smoke. (I saw no such pits, but did find large amounts of charcoal on the Nazca plains.)

On a clear spring day in 1975,
Condor I
confounded its critics and lifted up into the desert sky. It flew for several minutes, reaching a thousand feet above the Nazca Lines.

For my money, Jim Woodman is more from the Thor Heyerdahl school of science, than from the Von Daniken stable of pseudo-science. He with his balloon and Carlos with his hang-glider were convinced that only a flying man, a Birdman, could have drawn the Nazca Lines. But it seemed as if some fragment of understanding was missing. Surely the theorists were off track: forcing pegs into holes they didn’t fit.

As we braced ourselves for landing, I was still thinking about
el colibri
, the hummingbird. I didn’t doubt that the technology existed a thousand years ago to have drawn it, but my thinking had begun to change. None of the theories had taken into account
why
ancient man would have wanted such gigantic symbols around him.