The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  Woodman saw textiles taken from graves at the village of Cahuachi, not far from Nazca. The weave was impressive (185 x 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 colibrí, 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.

  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 three hundred feet 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 Pepe. 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.

  “Usted es muy bienvenido, you are very welcome, Señor,” he said, clapping his hands together. “It is wonderful to have you here!”

  I thanked him for his reception.

  “iQué alegría!” he called, “your arrival calls for celebration!”

  Pepe 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 Pepe.

  In the bright light I scanned the shelves.

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

  He handed me a mug of tea.

  “Hungry, are you?”

  I said that I was not.

  “Go on,” Pepe 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. Pepe 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 savory.

  “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 Pepe’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 Pepe. “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 ball bearing 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: jewelry 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 gray” alien. Cranial deformations were once popular with the ancient Nazca and Paracas civilizations. 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 Pepe’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?”

  Pepe 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 Señor 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 Pepe.

  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 Bic 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 prize 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 Pepe 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.”

  Pepe 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 peligioso, it’s a dangerous place,” he said firmly. “Muchos sustos, many frights.”

  NINE

  The Trophy Head

  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 tranquility, 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 Pepe’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 tires 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 Pepe’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. Pepe 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 Señor 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.

  “iAmigo!” cried the farmer. “My friend! ¿Cómo está su padre? How’s your father?”

  Pepe was well, he said, despite his bad luck.

  “¿Susto?” 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.

  In the background I made out the atmospheric buzz of a radio. The woman, known to all as Tía, aunt, had switched it on full volume. Like the best chair, the radio was saved for the rare arrival of guests.


  José Luis said I was interested in the ancient people of the Atacama. He explained that I’d come across the ocean, from the “Land of Diana”. When he thought I wasn’t listening, he added that my heart was strong; I could not be frightened.

  Juan went over to the corner and delved his hands into a cardboard box. He returned a moment later with a parcel, wrapped in brown paper.

  “We found this seven years ago,” he said, as he handed it to me.

  Gripping the package between my knees, I pulled apart the sheets of paper. Had I been a believer in susto, it would have got me right then. I jerked backwards. On my lap was a mummified human head.

  Juan said that since they had found the trophy head in a grave behind the house, they had been blessed with good fortune.

  “We honor it at Christmas, at Easter and festival times,” he said. “It’s a part of our family, as much as anyone else.”

  The head had all the classic hallmarks of the ancient Nazcan techniques. The skin was intact, although preserved with a clay-like preparation. The eyes were sealed shut, the lips pinned together with thorns; and a carrying string had been threaded through a hole, trepanned through the brow. My interest in tsantsas, shrunken heads, had introduced me to all kinds of trophy heads.

  Ethnologists have long debated whether human trophy heads were those of dead relatives, slain warriors, or even of people sacrificed at the graveside. Whatever the truth, one thing is certain – the trophy heads found at Nazca are expertly mummified. The general consensus is that the skin was peeled away, before the heads were boiled. Then, when the brain had been cleaned out, the skin was reapplied and layered with preservatives.

  I was struck by the likeness of the trophy to the tsantsas for which I had such a fondness. Shrunken heads, like Juan’s trophy, were typically suspended from a string, and had the lips skewered with splinters of chonta palm. This prevented them from calling out to members of their own tribe. (Similar, too, are the trophy heads from Nagaland, in India’s North-east, which have buffalo horns fixed to the ears, to stop the head from hearing its rescuers.)