As the sun finally pushed its way above the mountaintops, Adams turned to Lynn. ‘So where do we find Baranelli?’ he asked her.
‘I’m not a hundred per cent sure,’ Lynn replied sheepishly, ‘but I think I’ve got a good idea.’
The Nazca Lines Hotel, on Jiron Bolognesi, was just five minutes from the famed Nazca Lines, which explained its popularity among tourists, astronomers, explorers and conspiracy theorists.
The lines had originally been noticed in 1939, when an American scientist called Paul Kosok flew over the dry coastline in a small plane. The lines up until then had been thought to be part of some form of irrigation system, but Kosok, an expert in irrigation, quickly discounted such an explanation.
His flight happened to coincide with the summer solstice, and he soon discovered that the lines of the sunset ran parallel to those of a huge drawing of a bird in the desert sands, which made him dub the area ‘the biggest astronomy book in the world’.
After Kosok, a young German mathematician called Maria Reiche went on to study the area for the next five decades, concluding that the colossal drawings were part of an astronomical calendar made by the people of the Nazca culture, possibly also intended to send messages to the gods.
Reiche had lived at the Nazca Lines Hotel, then known as the Hotel Turistas for many years, giving hour-long talks about the archaeological phenomenon every evening.
Lynn had heard Baranelli talk about Reiche back at Harvard, and felt sure that he would stay in no other place during his time in Nazca. Not that there were many other places anyway.
Adams and Lynn walked past trimmed lawns and baby palm trees and entered the hotel’s white-painted colonial foyer. They made straight for the reception desk.
Lynn, trying not to be too self-conscious about her missing tooth and her generally dishevelled appearance, strode towards the desk, a smile on her face.
‘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.