She took a quick swig of beer.
“Now, this is where the mystery begins. The Nazca Lines can only be seen from the air! In fact, they were only discovered in 1927 when one of the first aeroplanes in Peru flew over them. I wish I’d been on board, that’s all I can say! Anyway, obviously the Nazcan people didn’t have planes. So the question is – why go to all the trouble of making the lines and the pictures if they’d never be able to see them?
“There have been all sorts of theories,” Professor Chambers went on. “One writer believed that the lines were some sort of airport for spaceships from another planet. It’s true that one of the pictures does show a man with a round head and some people believe it to be an astronaut. A lot of people think they were drawn for the benefit of the ancient gods. They would be up in the sky, so they’d be able to see them. My own feeling has always been that they are in some way connected to the stars … perhaps they were used to forecast stars. Or perhaps…” She paused. “I’ve often wondered if they weren’t put there to warn us about something.”
Her cigar glowed red. Smoke crept up the side of her face. She seemed to be deep in thought. But then, abruptly, she sat down again.
“Many theories. But the point is – nobody knows for sure.”
“Is the place of Qolqa in the desert?” Matt said.
“Yes, it is.” Professor Chambers nodded. “Once again, you should have seen it from the plane. Qolqa is a word in Quechua, the ancient language of Peru. It means ‘granary’. And it’s the name given to the great rectangle we flew over this morning.”
“Before the place of Qolqa…” Matt read out the second line of the poem. “That means the gate must be in front of the rectangle!”
“It may not mean anything of the sort!” the professor snapped. “There is no gate in the desert. That is to say, there are no standing stones, no markers, no buildings. There’s just the earth and the lines.”
“But there’s a platform,” Matt returned. “Salamanda said he needed to find the platform.”
“Well, good luck to him. I’ve been into the desert a thousand times and I’ve never seen a platform.” Professor Chambers tapped ash into a saucer on the table. “Mind you, it could be buried,” she muttered. “I suppose that’s always a possibility.”
“Are you sure there’s no swan?” Richard asked.
The professor slammed down her cigar, extinguishing it. “Mr Cole!” she exclaimed. “The day I began studying the Nazca Lines, you were still in nappies. How dare you suggest…?”
Matt thought she was going to throw something at the journalist, but she forced herself to calm down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you have to understand. The Nazca Lines are my life, which is to say, I’ve devoted my whole life to them. I visited them for the first time when I was twenty-three years old and since then, they’ve never let me go. Can you understand that? There are so few things left in the world that we don’t know. Science has explained everything away. And yet here we have one of the last, great mysteries. A whole desert filled with drawings that nobody understands. It’s my sole ambition to solve the mystery before I die.
“And the fact that you should walk into my life – right now – just three days before Inti Raymi. You come with your extraordinary story and maybe what you’ve told me will finally unlock everything. I’ve been waiting for this for more than thirty years. So I mustn’t quarrel with you. You have to let me think about what you’ve had to say.”
“Inti Raymi,” Richard muttered.
He was remembering what the Inca had said.
Before the sun had risen and set three times…
“That’s right, Mr Cole. That’s the one thing we do know. We have less than forty-eight hours. At midnight, two days from now. That’s when the gate is going to open.”
NIGHT IN THE DESERT
They drove out as the sun began to set. Professor Chambers was behind the wheel. Richard was next to her with Matt, Pedro and Atoc in the back of the soft-top jeep. They were planning to go off-road, but it was uncomfortable enough already. The vehicle had rock-hard suspension, which meant they felt every bump and crack in the road. Although the windows were closed, dust came in underneath the roof flaps and it was often hard to breathe. The engine was deafening and made the seats vibrate. It was like travelling in an oversized washing machine.
“I’d much rather do this by day,” the professor shouted. “But all things considered, it looks as if we may be a little short of time. And anyway, we may find it easier to sniff around without plane-loads of tourists buzzing over our heads every ten minutes.”
“Won’t there be guards?” Richard asked.
“There are meant to be. But there’s never enough of them and the ones who are out here will probably be asleep. Anyway, I have a special permit to go into the desert … which is more than I can say for Mr Salamanda! If I’d found him or his people tramping over the lines, I’d have had his guts for garters – and I don’t care how important he thinks he is.”
Matt glanced at Pedro who was looking out of the window, even though there was very little to see. “OK?” he asked.
Pedro nodded.
“You should get some sleep,” the professor said. “This could be a long night.”
Two hours later, she stopped and checked her map. The sun had virtually disappeared below the horizon but there was still a red glow in the sky, as if it was unwilling to let go of the heat of the day. The professor pushed the gear stick into four-wheel drive and spun the wheel. Almost at once the jeep began to bounce up and down as it swapped the bitumen surface of the highway for the rough stones and rock of the desert floor.
They drove for another hour. The professor glanced a couple more times at the map but she had a good idea where they were going. After all, she had been visiting this place for more than thirty years and knew just about every inch of it. At last she stopped.
“We can walk this last part,” she said. “There are spades in the back. Also water bottles, sandwiches and – most important of all – chocolate. Peruvian chocolate is absolutely first rate, by the way. Nothing like those sickly little bars you get in England.”
Matt stepped out of the jeep.
He guessed that the great rectangle – the place of Qolqa – must be somewhere in front of him but he could see nothing of it. The rapidly fading light didn’t help. He understood now why the Nazca Lines had remained undiscovered for so long. There was nothing to see at ground level apart from a flat, empty plateau. He was like an ant, crawling across a tabletop. The landscape was simply too big to decipher. Only from above would the pictures become visible. He had seen them clearly from the plane. Now he was among them they had disappeared.
“Look here!” Professor Chambers called out.
She turned on the torch and pointed it down. The beam of light picked out tyre tracks – freshly made, Matt guessed. It seemed that the desert was a bit like the surface of the moon in that any mark stayed there permanently. The professor followed the tyre tracks for a short distance, then swung the torch around. Two cars had come. This was where they had stopped. There were dozens of footprints. Several people must have got out.
“This is going to be easier than I thought,” Professor Chambers muttered.
“What do you mean?” Richard asked.
“Your poem tells us to stand in front of the place of Qolqa. That’s where we are now. And somewhere here there must be … something. As I’ve already made perfectly clear, it must be below the surface because if it wasn’t, I’d have seen it. In which case, I thought we’d have to spend half the night digging. But that’s not the case. All we have to do is follow the footsteps. Mr Salamanda may think he’s clever but he’s left us a path.”
They followed the footsteps away from the jeep and ever further into the desert. After about two hundred metres, they came to an area where some sort of digging had obviously taken place. The earth was loose. And in the light of the torch, the colour was quite diffe
rent.
“This is it!” Richard said.
“Yes.” Professor Chambers handed him the torch. “The four of you can start digging. I’m going back to the jeep.”
“What for?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to make the tea!”
There was one spade for each of them and together they began to dig. There was barely enough light left to see by. To Matt, it seemed that the other three were little more than shadows. It was still hot. After just a few minutes of digging, the dust had clogged in Matt’s throat. It stung his eyes and settled in his hair. He could feel the sweat making muddy tracks as it trickled down his face. Pedro had stopped digging. He was now holding a torch for the others.
But the earth, already disturbed once, came away easily. In just a few minutes, they had dug a trench half a metre deep. Meanwhile, the professor had returned with the food hamper and a Primus stove. Matt heard the hiss of gas and then the pop of the flame as she lit it and began to boil some water for tea. She clearly had no fear of being seen – but then the stove only let out a tiny pinprick of light in the great emptiness of the desert and it was highly unlikely there was a guard anywhere near.
Atoc’s spade hit the ground with a loud clang. “There is something…” he said.
Richard and Matt stopped and went over to where he was working. He had struck some sort of brickwork.
“Be careful!” Professor Chambers called. Was she afraid of what they might find? Or was it that she didn’t want them to do any damage to something that might be of archaeological interest?
Quickly, the four of them began to scoop away the earth, using the side edges of their spades. Professor Chambers came back over with the torch. Something flat and square had been revealed. She swung the light over it and saw a brick platform, decorated with a design in the centre. As they scraped off the last of the earth, more of the design was revealed. At last they could see it.
Professor Chambers looked down and frowned. “I take it that this is the sign you described to me,” she said. “The sign of the Old Ones.”
“Yes,” Matt whispered. He shivered. The heat seemed to have evaporated. “This is the sign.”
“But what is this thing that it’s on?” Richard asked.
“It’s a platform.” The professor peered more closely at it. “About five metres square, I would say. The bricks are made of andesite. Nothing unusual about that. But the design! Arrows and squiggly lines. That’s quite wrong!”
Pedro asked a question. Atoc translated. “What is it doing here?”
“Do you know?” Matt asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do have a pretty good idea.” Professor Chambers ran the torch over the surface one last time. “Let’s have some tea before we cover this back up,” she suggested. “And while we’re sitting down, we can have a talk.”
They went back to the Primus stove and Professor Chambers filled five mugs with hot, sweet tea made with mint leaves that she had picked from her garden. Apart from the hiss of the gas, all was silent in the great emptiness of the desert.
“I’ll try to keep this simple,” she began. “Although it isn’t. It’s actually bloody complicated. But I’ve told you about the mystery of the Nazca Lines. Now I’ve got to explain to you my solution to the mystery. I actually wrote a book about it a while ago although not many people believed me.” She fell silent for a moment. “Maybe Salamanda read it. Maybe I’m partly responsible for everything that’s happened. I’ll try to explain.
“As I told you, I’ve studied the lines for most of my life. I was fascinated by them from the moment that I first saw them, and at the time I thought it was because they were so beautiful … so very perfect. But as the years went on, I realized that I was wrong. I can’t explain how it happened but I began to believe that they … that there was something evil about them. The pictures of the animals are wonderful. I don’t deny it. But it crossed my mind that to the ancient Nazcan people two thousand years ago, they must have been terrifying too. Huge spiders. Monstrous whales. Even the monkey is grotesque, reaching out with its spindly arms. It has only four fingers on one hand. Why do you think that the people who drew the lines gave it one finger too few?”
“Maybe they couldn’t count,” Richard said.
“No, no. They could count perfectly well. But, you see, in primitive societies, deformity is something to be feared, a bad omen. Maybe that’s the point. All the animals could have been drawn simply to scare people.”
She took out another cigar and lit it. The smoke shone silver against the black night sky.
“Most people now agree that the Nazca Lines have something to do with the stars,” she went on. “I actually studied astronomy at university a long time ago and from the very start it was my opinion that the lines were nothing more nor less than a huge star map.
“This is how it would work. A line would point to a star at certain times of the year. That is to say, you’d stand on the line and look down it and if you saw a star rising up over the horizon right in front of you, you’d know it was the fifth of April and time to start planting the grain or whatever. Easy enough! But later on, I started to think about it more. What would happen if there was a moment, perhaps no more than a few minutes in a thousand years, when all the lines pointed to all the visible stars – at exactly the same time? Now that would be…” She stopped. “Am I boring you, Matthew?”
Matt’s head was craned upwards. His eyes were searching the night sky. He had been listening to begin with but something had distracted him. What was it? There were no sounds in the desert. Could he have imagined it? No. There it was again, a soft beating in the air like a flag caught in the wind. He waited, his ears pricked. But it had gone.
“Are you listening?” Professor Chambers asked.
Matt turned to her. “Yes. Of course.”
“Good. Because this is where things get a bit more complicated.
“As I was saying, I wondered if all the stars could align with all the Nazca Lines. But how would this happen? Well, imagine that you could lie on your back on the desert floor and take a photograph of the night sky. You’d end up with a big sheet of paper with lots of little dots on it. Then you could go up in the air and take a photograph of the lines, making a second picture. What I was looking for was a time when the stars in the first picture would fall exactly on the lines in the second picture…”
“A sort of join-the-dots on a cosmic scale,” Richard said.
“Exactly. Of course, this wouldn’t happen very often. It might never happen at all. You see, the stars always seem to be moving when you look at them from the Earth. The reason for this is that it’s the Earth that’s actually moving – spinning on its own axis. That’s why the stars never seem to be in the same position.
“And the Earth isn’t only spinning. It’s also orbiting around the sun. And as it orbits, it wobbles. Astronomers call this wobble ‘precession’. And what it means is that the Earth is only in exactly the same position once every twenty-six thousand years.
“So to go right back to where I started, what I wondered and what I wrote about in my book was, suppose that the Nazca Lines were drawn as a sort of terrible warning. Suppose that what they were doing was recording one moment in twenty-six thousand years when they would finally line up with the stars and the world would come to an end. That would explain why the pictures were so frightening. It would explain why they had to be drawn in the first place.”
“And you think the lines will align with the stars two nights from now?” Richard asked.
“I was never able to test my theory before now because I never had an observation platform. Don’t forget that this desert covers five hundred square kilometres! I had to know exactly where to stand to see the stars in their right position.”
“And now you do.”
“Yes…”
Suddenly, Pedro sprang to his feet.
“Pedro?” The professor looked at him. “Qué te pasa?”
Matt stood
up too. “I heard something just a moment ago,” he said.
The Primus stove was still burning, the little gas jet throwing a blue glow across the ground. The jeep stood where it had been parked. The night had grown cool and now there was a faint touch of breeze in the air. Matt looked up at the sky, at the millions of glistening stars. For a moment, he thought he saw two tiny green lights. He shook his head. There was no such thing as a green star.
“You’re imagining things,” Richard said. “There’s nothing out here.”
Unwillingly, Pedro and Matt sat down again. They couldn’t leave until they had covered their tracks and they weren’t ready to begin work again yet.
“The platform marks the exact position where you have to stand to see the alignment of the stars,” the professor continued. “That’s what it said in the verse you showed me. Before the place of Qolqa, there will the light be seen…”
“The light that is the end of all light.” Matt finished the poem.
Professor Chambers nodded gravely. “There you have it again. This is the place. And we also know the time. Two days from now. Inti Raymi.” “That’s when the gate opens.”
“Except we don’t know where the gate is,” Richard cut in. “There are no stone circles in the desert.”
“What makes you think it has to be a stone circle?”
Suddenly Atoc cried out and pointed. And there they were again – two green lights, burning in the air high above them, but already moving downwards. Matt stared into the darkness. There was something large and bulky behind the lights. He could make out wings.
There was a ghastly shriek. Matt dived onto his stomach as an enormous bird plummeted towards him, steel-like claws reaching out for his face. He felt a searing pain in his shoulder, heard the cloth of his shirt tear as the claws ripped through. Then it wheeled away and the desert was silent once again but for the beating of its wings in the night air.