Origin (15 page)

‘Good morning,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Do you speak English?’

The young female clerk nodded her head. ‘A little, yes.’

‘Great,’ Lynn said. ‘We’re fellows up from Harvard, we’re supposed to be meeting Professor Baranelli here for breakfast but I think we might be a little too early. Would it be OK if we wait here for him?’

The clerk looked unsure. ‘You are wanting to meet Professor for breakfast?’

Lynn nodded her head. ‘That’s right,’ she confirmed.

‘I’m very sorry, Professor Baranelli no here.’

‘He’s not staying here?’ Lynn asked, more than a little worried.

‘Oh no, he is staying here, it is that he has already left.’

‘Left?’ Lynn asked. ‘Where’s he gone?’

The clerk pointed back out across the manicured lawn. ‘The airfield across the road,’ she said. ‘If you hurry, you might get there before he flies.’

Less than two minutes later, Adams and Lynn were back across the Jiron Bolognesi, pounding quickly through a metal archway and across the cold tarmac towards the small flight centre.

Looking up, they could see two small propeller-driven aircraft heading out across the skies. Did one of them hold Baranelli?

There were a dozen or so other planes scattered around the open hangars, three of which seemed to be getting ready for flight. For so small a place, the airstrip seemed inordinately busy.

Adams was just reaching for the door of the flight centre when Lynn tugged at his sleeve. ‘Matt,’ she said excitedly, pointing over to one of the three aircraft which were taxiing to the runway. ‘There he is!’

Adams followed Lynn’s outstretched finger, seeing a slightly overweight, balding man with a deep tan, steel-rimmed spectacles and old-fashioned khaki shirt and shorts, about to climb on board one of the little planes.

‘Professor!’ Lynn shouted across the runway.

The man looked her way, annoyance on his face, albeit mixed with a hint of curiosity.

When Lynn waved her hand and shouted to him again, recognition dawned and a wide smile broke his heavy features. He gestured for the pilot to stop the plane and he practically ran to Lynn across the runway.

‘Lynn!’ he exclaimed in an ebullient, southern Italian accent. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘We need your help,’ Lynn said directly.

After a moment’s consideration, Baranelli smiled. ‘Of course, whatever you need is yours. But we will have to talk on the plane,’ he said, turning back to board the aircraft. ‘We only have an hour where the conditions will remain perfect.’

Lynn looked at Adams and groaned.
Another aircraft?
That was all she needed.

Still, she followed Baranelli aboard the small plane, praying that for once – just
once
– she would be able to land normally.

‘Most of the year, you have to be in the air mid-morning or early afternoon due to the haze at other times,’ Baranelli explained as the Cessna lifted off from the airstrip, climbing high into the thin mountain air, ‘but I’ve found recently that the early morning is best. I’ve been up here fifty times already, and it still fascinates me, let me tell you.’

Lynn and Adams both nodded. Lynn knew that her old friend was the most passionate of men, and no more so than when he was talking about his work. She would have to try hard to steer the conversation around to what they wanted. But just as she was about to speak, Baranelli interjected.

‘Have you seen the lines from the air before?’ he asked both of his guests.

Adams and Lynn shook their heads.

‘No?’ Baranelli said delightedly. ‘Well, you’re in for a treat! And who better to give you the guided tour than me? If you’re lucky,’ he said with a wink, ‘I’ll even fill you in on my own theories about the site.’

For the next thirty minutes, the aeroplane described lazy arcs across the sky as it traced the immense lines of the Nazca plain.

Baranelli was like a machine, simultaneously making notes in a dog-eared booklet, taking high-definition photographs and performing complex calculations whilst also continuously and enthusiastically narrating the history of the lines better than any professional tour guide could have done.

‘Isn’t it incredible?’ Baranelli asked, and not for the first time. ‘From here, the lines and geoglyphs look to have no purpose, meaninglessly intersected across the pampa, some expertly executed, others crudely rendered, just a big jumbled mess. But if we look closer,’ he continued, nodding to the pilot who began to descend, closer to the desert plain, ‘we can see the beauty of the design. We can see the wedges,’ he said, indicating huge trapezoidal designs, stretching for up to two and a half thousand feet, ‘and how they are intersected by the lines themselves – perfectly straight for up to
nine miles
. And then there are spirals, triangles, circles, the list goes on. These geometric shapes, do you know how many there are here?’

Lynn shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Somewhere in the region of
nine hundred
. Nine hundred! Can you believe it? It is truly incredible. And then there are the shapes!’ Baranelli continued, in a world of his own. ‘There are around
seventy
biomorphs – animal and plant figures, including some very well-known examples. The hummingbird, the heron, the condor, the dog, the hands, the spider, the pelican, the monkey,’ he said, punctuating each word with a stab of his finger in the geoglyph’s direction, and Adams and Lynn found themselves staring in awe at the designs, clustered together in one area of the vast plain, which Baranelli had told them was nearly two hundred square miles in area. The size of the shapes was astounding. From their vantage point, Adams estimated the pelican figure must have been almost a thousand feet in length.

‘And then we have my personal favourite,’ Baranelli continued, smiling. ‘The astronaut.’

Peering out of the aircraft’s windows, Adams and Lynn looked down at a figure etched on to the side of a small hill. The light caught the image perfectly, and they could both see the design of a man, seemingly wearing some sort of helmet, right hand raised in greeting. But to whom? To what?

‘Well?’ Baranelli asked his guests, clearly excited. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s certainly interesting,’ Lynn replied. ‘What’s its purpose?’

Baranelli turned away from the window and raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘That is the question! What is any of it for? What do you think?’ he asked, a professor testing his students.

‘There’ve been many theories over the years,’ Lynn started, ‘beginning with Kosok’s belief that it represented some sort of astronomical calendar, but computer modelling showed that the alignments were no more common than random chance.’

‘Indeed,’ Baranelli agreed, nodding his head. ‘And what else?’

‘Well, I think the prevailing theory is that they are religious walkways, linked to water or fertility cults.’

‘Yes, many people are of that opinion,’ the professor concurred. ‘Ethnographical and historical data seem to indicate that worship of mountains and water sources dominated Nazcan religion and culture from ancient times. The lines can therefore be seen as sacred paths, leading the faithful to areas where such deities could be worshipped.’

‘Many people . . . but not you?’ Lynn probed.

Baranelli laughed at the idea. ‘Certainly not me!’

‘And so what do you believe?’ Adams asked.

‘It is time we landed,’ Baranelli said in reply. ‘We will continue our talk over lunch perhaps?’

A
N HOUR LATER,
Baranelli was ensconced with his two guests at a private table back at the Nazca Lines Hotel, a large glass of Chianti in his hand as he continued his lecture.

‘Have you heard of the “ancient astronaut” theory?’ he asked them.

Lynn nodded her head, sipping from a glass of water. ‘Back in the nineteen sixties, Erich von Däniken proposed that the straight lines were runways for extraterrestrial spacecraft, in fact he saw the whole Nazca plain as some sort of gigantic airport.’

‘That’s right,’ Baranelli said, ‘although we’re not sure if the surface would have been strong enough to take the weight of repeated landings. But he also had other interesting theories about the rest of the geoglyphs, claiming that the Nazcans drew them once these extraterrestrials had left, presumably having returned to their home planet.’

‘Why would they do that?’ Adams asked.

‘Similar things have been documented around the world,’ Baranelli explained. ‘So-called “cargo cults” emerge when an indigenous people is visited by a more highly advanced culture, ascribing to them – and their advanced “cargo” – supernatural significance, seeing them as deities and gods. There was a prevalence of such cults in the south-west Pacific Ocean in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the islands were used by the Americans and Japanese as staging posts for the war effort, bringing in huge amounts of materiel. When the bases closed after the war and these goods dried up, the island populations tried to encourage further deliveries of goods by building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and worshipping them.’

‘And this is what von Däniken believed happened here?’ Adams asked.

‘Yes, and he didn’t just stop there, he believed that religion as a whole, all over the world, was created to worship extraterrestrials who had come down to earth, amazing primitive man with their advanced technology and leaving them to come up with supernatural explanations for what they had seen.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Adams said sceptically. ‘So God was an alien?’

‘One of von Däniken’s chapter headings – indeed probably the one that made him famous – is “Was God an Astronaut?”’ Baranelli explained, a smile on his face.

‘And just what evidence did he give to support that claim?’ Adams asked, still not buying it.

‘You have to understand that it is not just von Däniken who has argued this over the years, but many people – astronomers, astrophysicists, historians, philosophers, you name it. There is a large body of what they would term
evidence
in support of the theory, although others would say it was a body of curious anomalies rather than outright evidence.’

‘What sort of anomalies?’ Lynn asked, still trying to find a link between her own discovery and this talk of ancient aliens.

‘The Nazca Lines are one such anomaly – where did they come from, who designed them, and for what purpose? Does the fact that they can only be seen from the air indicate that whoever drew them meant for them to be seen by airborne peoples? And where would this flying technology have come from so long ago? So we have an anomaly, something that doesn’t seem to fit in with regular historical or archaeological knowledge.

‘And what else do we have?’ Baranelli asked before Adams or Lynn had the chance to reply. ‘A sixteenth-century map discovered in the ruins of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul shows Antarctica at the bottom, with the land mass shown much as it would appear if it were free from ice – something which it has not been for fifteen million years. So was this a copy from maps made millions of years ago, or did this sixteenth-century admiral have access to ground-penetrating radar and satellite analysis? And if he did, where could this technology have possibly come from?

‘Then there are the various ancient artworks which show what seem to be alien visitors, or astronauts with helmets – much like the geoglyph we have just seen, in fact. These can be found from ancient cave drawings in the African Sahara to Mayan temples in Mexico, and everywhere in between – Zimbabwe, South Africa, Russia, Val Camonica in northern Italy, Uzbekistan, the list goes on and on. Always the same images – what seem to be man-like figures in strange clothes and helmets. The carving from the Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque in Mexico, for example, clearly shows an astronaut-like figure sitting at the controls of a miniature rocket-ship. Can that be explained conventionally?’

Baranelli took a large drink of his wine before ploughing on. ‘And what about such mysteries as the Mayan calendar, predicting eclipses for untold thousands of years? Where did they get the technology to calculate such things? Ancient electric batteries have been found in Iraq, nine thousand-year-old crystal lenses in Assyria, an iron post in a courtyard in Delhi that has not rusted in four thousand years, a twenty-
thousand
-ton granite block turned upside down in Peru – who can explain such things?

‘And let us not forget the Great Pyramid of Khufu, and all of its surrounding temples, the Great Sphinx, and so on. Do we know, even now, how such things were built? Or why? The Great Pyramid was built from over two million stone blocks, some of which weighed as much as seventy tons. It is the most accurately aligned structure in existence, facing true north with only one-twentieth of one degree of error, and is also located precisely at the centre of the earth’s land mass. The outer casing stones were highly polished and flat to an accuracy of one-hundredth of an inch, and could have been seen from Israel, and perhaps even the moon. Why? The answer is, we simply do not know. We only know these anomalies are there, crying out for an explanation.’

‘And aliens can provide such an explanation?’ Adams asked.

‘Why not? People claim they visit us now, why should they not have come thousands of years ago?’ Baranelli could see the disbelief in the eyes of both Adams and Lynn, and although he did not necessarily subscribe to the theory himself, he also knew it could not be discounted out of hand. ‘Some people,’ he carried on, ‘see information contained in religious texts as direct evidence of alien visitation.’

‘Go on,’ Adams said, unsure but curious now.

‘Has it never occurred to you that most religions have very similar stories in their writings? Ancient Sumer, the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, the Old and New Testaments – all are almost identical, once you get right down to it. And where did culture – science, mathematics, agriculture, writing – originate?’

‘Ancient Sumer,’ Lynn answered.

Baranelli clicked his fingers. ‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘So after millions of years of slow, painful evolution, we have a sudden spurt of development. In the blink of an eye – in evolutionary terms – we were irrigating the land, building temples, making complicated mathematical calculations, reading and writing. So what went on in ancient Sumer?