Evidence of the Gods (11 page)

Which psychology will provide yet another excuse for this phenomenon? The motifs of intercontinental rock art can of course be photographed. Our “Stone Agers” did not engage in global tourism. So only a single answer remains: they must have observed similar things. Something mighty and incomprehensible revealed itself worldwide, which imprinted itself on the minds of the Stone Age artists. And they left traces for eternity.

In the vastness of Brazil, prehistoric finds are often the discovery of amateurs. The Austrian Ludwig von Schwennhagen was an amateur with an obsession. He lived as a philosophy and history teacher in Teresina, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Piaui. He discovered a giant area with rock drawings, divided the region into seven districts, and called them Sete Cidades, or seven cities. His book about Sete Cidades
¹⁴
appeared in 1928, but it generated no great interest. Ludwig von Schwennhagen died as an impoverished school teacher.

Sete Cidades lies to the north of Teresina, between the towns of Piripiri and Rio Longe (about 3,000 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro). The landscape is flat and of an intensive green, the roadsides lined with bushes. It alternates with sections of rainforest. Wild pigs, wild cows, and even wild horses make driving hazardous. Though Sete Cidades is almost at the equator, the climate is nevertheless bearable, because a light breeze is constantly blowing from the Atlantic coast 300 kilometers away. Sete Cidades is reached from Piripiri by a 16-kilometer-long road.

The visitor unexpectedly comes up against the rock walls. It is as if one were standing amidst burning chaos, torn apart like the Biblical Gomorrah, destroyed by fire and brimstone. A hill lies hidden beneath the shell of a tortoise—that, at least, is what it looks like, but science assures us that these are unusual forms of glacial deposits. (
Image 99
) Glacial deposits? Here? By the equator? When is that supposed to have happened? My escort, an official from the state of Piaui, offered another explanation: In earlier times, Sete Cidades had been an ocean basin and the strange rocks were nothing more than eroded rocks. Wind and weather had sculpted the curious forms over millennia. (
Images 100
and
101
)

Even if the origin of the strange landscape formations remains a mystery, the rock drawings are a fact. There are tens of thousands of them. They cling to overhanging rocks (
Image 102
) or salute us from walls at a height of 15 meters (
Image 103
). Once again, the same questions arise as in the rock cauldron of the Hopi near Oraibi, Arizona: Did the artists build scaffolding? Descend on ropes? Pile stones on top of one another? Why so many colored drawings in a single place at all? A Stone Age meeting point? And, as if by agreement, those “gods” on the rock walls with their haloes, rays, or helmet-like forms around their heads. (
Image 104
)