Chapter 5 Chapter 4 The Flying Vulture

I came to southern Peru, flying over the Nazca plateau, overlooking the figures and lines drawn on the ground. The plane flies over the graphics of whales and monkeys, and a hummingbird looms in front of you.It flapped its wings and stretched out its slender beak, as if pecking at nectar.Then, the plane turned sharply to the right, crossing the desolate and rugged Pan-American Highway, casting tiny shadows on the ground.The plane soars in the air for a while, bringing us over the legendary snake-necked figure "Alcatraz".It was actually a heron, carved into the ground, 900 feet long, and must have been created by some imaginative geometer.We took a loop through the air, crossed the road again, and flew over a fantastic pattern, seeing a school of fish and triangles next to a pelican.The plane turned left.A gigantic vulture with outstretched wings majestically looms above the ground before our eyes.

I was dumbfounded.Suddenly, another heron appeared next to the plane—this is a living heron—with a very aggressive expression, like a fallen angel, returning to heaven on a thermal rising from the ground.The guy flying the plane took a breath and tried to stalk the heron.After a while, I saw a sharp and cold eye staring straight at us, looking at us with disdain.Then, like a bird of old mythology, it made an oblique turn and glided back into the sun, leaving our little single-engine cessna struggling and spinning low in the air. At this moment, a pair of straight, parallel lines appeared under our feet, about two miles long, stretching all the way to the horizon, without end.The series of abstract figures depicted on the ground on the right are so large in scale but so delicately crafted that we have to wonder if they are human works.

The common people in this area say that these lines and shapes are not the products of mortals, but the works left by the demigods "Viracocha people".Thousands of years ago, this group also left their "fingerprints" in other parts of the South American Andes. huge lines on the plateau The Nazca plateau in southern Peru is a desolate and dry place with poor soil and no crops.Since ancient times, this area has been very sparsely populated, and there will not be a large number of people moving here in the future—the surface of the moon does not look barren like the Nazca Plateau.

However, if you are an artist and you want to create a large-scale and magnificent work, the desolate Nazca plateau is an ideal location.Its expansive 200-square-mile terrace ensures that your work won't be blown away by desert storms or covered in flying sand. Of course there are sometimes strong winds on the plateau, but due to certain physical effects, the wind here is not as strong as on the flat ground. The small boulders all over the prairie absorb and retain the sun's light and heat, and emit warm air. A protective "force-field" is formed in the air.Moreover, the soil here contains enough gypsum to "glue" pebbles under the ground, and this glue, moistened with dew each morning, will remain in effect forever.So when the artist puts the picture on the ground here, it never fades away.Rain is rare in this part of the world; in fact, there have been less than half an hour of drizzle in ten years.There is no doubt that the Nazca Plateau is one of the driest places on earth.

So if you're an artist and you want to create something majestic, something that will last forever and be enjoyed by generations to come, then this barren and strange plateau is the canvas of your dreams. Experts examining pottery fragments inlaid in lines and taking carbon-14 measurements of various organic materials unearthed here have confirmed that the Nazca ruins are very old.The dates they speculate range from 350 BC to 600 AD.As for the age of the lines themselves, experts do not make any speculations, because the lines, like the surrounding stones, are inherently undated.Let's just say this: the most recent lines are also at least 1400 years old.But in theory, these lines may be older than we surmise.The reason is simple: the artifacts from which we infer these dates may have been brought to the Nazca plateau by later people.

Most of the lines and figures are distributed over a complete territory in southern Peru, bordered on the north by the Rio Ingenio and on the south by the Rio Nazca.The Pan-American Highway enters from the northern end and obliquely crosses this square yellow-brown desert, stretching for 46 kilometers.On this piece of land, there are hundreds of figures of various shapes scattered.Some depict various birds and beasts (there are 18 different bird species in total), but many more are geometric figures, including trapezoids, rectangles, triangles and straight lines.From a bird's eye view, these geometric figures - to modern eyes - look like dozens of criss-crossing airstrips, as if a paranoid civil engineer was ordered to build a weird and grotesque airport here.

It's no wonder that some people see the Nazca Lines as an airport runway for aliens to land—after all, humans didn't learn to fly until the early 20th century.This idea is of course very interesting, but unfortunately it cannot withstand the verification of logic.It is difficult for us to understand why aliens who possess advanced technology and can travel hundreds of light-years across space for interstellar travel need an airport for their spacecraft to land.Could it be that the technology they have mastered is not enough to allow the "flying saucer" they take to land vertically?

Upon closer inspection, we can conclude that the Nazca Lines have never been used as take-off and landing strips by "flying saucers" or other aircraft - although some lines do look a lot like airport runways from a bird's-eye view.Seen from the ground, these lines are nothing more than grinding marks on the ground; apparently, someone has scraped away the thousands of tons of black volcanic debris that covered the desert, revealing the pale yellow sand below.The furrows made in this way were all only a few inches deep, and the foundation was too soft to bear the wheels of the aircraft.The German mathematician Maria Reiche, who has studied the Nazca lines for half a century, overturned the alien theory with a succinct remark a few years ago: "I am afraid that astronauts will get stuck in the mud." in, unable to move."

What was the purpose of the Nazca Lines if not the runway on which the fire chariots of the "Alien God" landed?Honestly, no one knows the answer, and no one has been able to date them.These lines are a historical mystery.The closer you look, the more mysterious the lines and shapes become. For example, the figures of birds and animals here are obviously older than the geometric figures of "Runway", because there are many trapezoids, rectangles and straight lines cutting through the more complex movement patterns, cutting them into fragments.We can deduce from this that the artwork painted on the desert we see today must have been produced in two stages.In addition, we can also infer that the works completed in the previous stage are technically more advanced than the works in the later stage, although this inference violates the law of scientific and technological progress.The skills required to draw animal figures are, after all, much more complex and delicate than those involved in engraving straight lines.Now the question is: How long is the time distance between the former and the later stages?

Scholars have not answered this question.Very hastily, they lumped these two stages of culture together and called it "Nazca culture".In their view, the Nazca were nothing more than a primitive tribe who somehow developed a sophisticated and sophisticated technique of artistic expression and then disappeared from Peru.Hundreds of years later, their successors—the Incas more familiar to Westerners—appeared on the land of Peru. How culturally mature are the "primitive" Nazca people?Just how high was their level of knowledge, so that they were able to leave a large-scale and magnificent artistic masterpiece on the Peruvian plateau?First, we seem to be certain that the Nazca were skilled at observing the sky.According to Dr. Phillis Pitluga, an astronomer at the Adler Pane tarium in Chicago, the Nazca are quite good astronomers.With the aid of a computer, Dr. Piruger's intensive study of astrological patterns on the Nazca plateau led to the conclusion that the famous spider pattern showed the shape of the constellation Orion, and that The straight lines connecting this figure are used to trace the course of the three stars of the Orion constellation③.

The implications of Dr. Piruger's findings are explored in more detail below.Here, we must point out that Nazca's spider figure also accurately depicts the shape of a spider scientifically named "Ricinulei".This spider is so rare that it can only be found in the most remote and hidden areas of the Amazon rainforest in the world. How did the "primitive" Nazca artist cross the towering and precipitous Andes Mountains and enter the Amazon River Basin in order to obtain certain ceremonial spiders as samples?What is even more puzzling is why they go all the way to catch a spider?Why were they able to fine-tune the body structure of a spider without a microscope, especially the reproductive organs at the end of the right foot? The figures of the Nazca Plateau are full of such mysteries; with the exception of the vulture, almost none of the birds and beasts it depicts are indigenous.Like Amazonian spiders, whales and monkeys, they seem out of place in this desert setting.There is a graphic depiction of a man with outstretched right hand, staring round eyes, and heavy boots on his feet. This person is so strange that it is impossible to determine what era or people he belongs to.Other drawings show the human body is equally strange: with a brilliant halo surrounding the head, it looks like a visitor from another planet.In size, the birds and beasts depicted in Nazca's drawings are also amazingly large: hummingbirds are 165 feet long, spiders are 150 feet long, vultures are almost 400 feet long from call to tail feathers (pelicans are not far behind in size). .The lizard whose tail was now cut in half by the Pan-American Highway measured 617 feet.Almost every piece of graphics on the Nazca Plateau can be called grand in scale, and all of them are made using difficult methods - using one continuous line to carefully depict the outline of an animal. A similar subtlety is manifested in geometric figures.Some figures are more than five miles long and look like ancient Roman highways, running through deserts, into dry river beds, and over rocky slopes, all straight from end to end. Although this kind of precision is a bit unbelievable, it is barely understandable.The most amazing thing is the animal graphics.At that time, there were no airplanes, and the progress of the creation could not be checked from the air. How did the artist complete such a large and perfect graphic?Viewed from the ground, these figures are nothing more than chaotic grooves carved on the desert.We can only see it in its true form from a few hundred feet in the air, and no nearby hill offers such a vantage point. people who make lines and maps I fly over these lines in a plane and explore the meanings contained therein. The pilot, Rodolfo Arias, had just retired from the Peruvian Air Force.Having driven a jet fighter for half his life, he thought the small single-engine Sisna was too slow and lifeless, like a taxi with wings on it.We flew back to Nazca Airport once, opened the window of the cabin, and asked my partner Santha to take pictures of the mysterious grooves on the ground from a vertical angle.For now, we're trying to capture shots from various heights.Looking down from two or three hundred feet in the air, the image of the Amazon spider on the plain seemed to come to life, opening its teeth and claws, soaring into the air and devouring us in one bite.At 500 feet in the air we saw several figures at once: a dog, a tree, strange hands, a vulture, triangles and trapezoids.At an altitude of 1,500 feet, the huge animal figures on the ground suddenly shrunk into piles of scattered small patterns, surrounded by huge, chaotic geometric figures.From a high-altitude bird's-eye view, these graphics no longer look like airport runways, but rather like roads paved by giants, criss-crossing across the plateau in various shapes and angles.At first glance, it is really dazzling. The ground kept receding, we flew higher and higher, and our vision became wider and wider.Looking down at the cuneiform-like grooves engraved on the plateau under my feet, I thought to myself that some kind of "method" must be needed to make these lines.I am reminded of a comment made by Maria Resch, a mathematician who lives on the Nazca Plateau and has studied these lines since 1946: These geometric figures remind us of a kind of cipher: the same words are sometimes written in capital letters, sometimes in lower case.Some lines have very similar shapes although their combined dimensions vary greatly.All graphics have several basic elements...④ Hovering high in the sky in a bumpy and swaying small plane, I suddenly remembered that the Nazca lines were not recognized correctly until after humans learned to fly in the 20th century. At the end of the 16th century, the magistrate named Luis de Monzon was the first Spaniard to see these mysterious "desert marks" with his own eyes.He not only brought back eyewitness reports, but also collected various strange legends of the "Viracocha people" related to the Nazca graphics⑤.However, it wasn’t until the 1930s, when regular flights between the Peruvian capital Lima and the southern city of Areguipa opened, that the world suddenly discovered that the world’s largest graphic art work actually existed in southern Peru. wasteland.The development of the aviation industry allows ordinary people to fly into the sky and look down like gods on dazzling and beautiful pictures that the world has never seen before. Rodolfo circled the monkey pattern on the ground in a small Sisna.This huge monkey is made up of a series of mysterious geometric figures.The pattern designed in this way gave me an indescribably weird feeling: it looks very complicated, but, somehow, it has a charming, almost evil power, which makes people can't help but stare at it .The whole body of the monkey is depicted with one continuous line.The line winds its way up stairs, over pyramids, through a series of zigzag obstacles, into a spiral maze (a monkey's tail), and finally transforms into a series of star-shaped curves.This graphic would be a masterpiece if drawn on a piece of paper, but this is the Nazca Desert (here, everything they do is generous and large-scale), and the body of this monkey is at least 400 feet Long, 300 feet wide... Is the person who made these lines the same person who made the map? Why are they called "Viracocha people"? Notes: ①Professors Morrison and Hawkins, "The Road to the Gods", p. 21. Tony Morrison with Professor Gerald S． Hawking, Pathways to the Gods, Book Club Associates, London, 1979, p. twenty one.See also Westwood, ed. Atlas of Uncharted Lands, p. 100. Jennifer Westwood, ed, The Atlas Of Myterious Places, Guild Publishing, London, 1987, p, 100. ② "The Road to the Gods", p. 21. ③The author discussed this issue with Dr. Piruger in a letter. ④Maria Resch, "Mysteries in the Desert", p. 58. Maria Reiche, mystery on the Desert, Nazca, Peru, 1989, p. 58． ⑤In 1586, Dimonzon served as the administrator and chief justice (Corregidor) of the Rucanas (Rucanas) and Solas (Saras) regions near Nazca.See Path to the Gods, p. 36, and Atlas of Rifts, p. 100.