Ethan nodded and patted his friend on the back. He walked down into the fuselage once more and approached Lucy.
‘Time’s almost up. Arnie’s going to have to land within the hour.’
Lucy shook her head and ran a hand through her hair as she sought desperately for some sign on the desert far below.
‘There’s nothing there that fits,’ she said. ‘The quipu just doesn’t match anything that we can see and it could take us hours of searching photographs of this site before we finally find what we’re looking for.’
Ethan peered out of the window at the various images on the desert floor and then looked at the quipu once more. Despite the vividness of the images there were far more straight lines than there were curves on the desert floor. He looked down at the quipu and then on an impulse he reached down and undid the neck of the quipu, then laid it back on the seat. The circular shape extended into a straight horizontal line, the beams of light from the sun now looking more like vines draped over the edge of a cliff, pointing straight down.
‘Most of the lines in that desert are straight,’ Ethan said. ‘Do you see anything now?’
Lucy peered at the quipu for a long moment, the shifted her gaze out of the window as she sought something to compare it with. ‘Nothing leaps out, but some of these lines run for immense distances. Even if we could get up to thirty thousand feet we probably wouldn’t be able to see the entire plateau.’
Ethan looked at the plateau below and his eyes caught on a vivid image of a hummingbird, drawn entirely from straight lines that hooked back on themselves to form the outline and the shape of its wings and tail. The elegant, long tip of its beak extended out in front of it and pointed away to the north east.
Ethan glanced at the quipu once more and then pointed at the bird. ‘What about that one?’
Lucy looked down at the bird, its image prominently displayed upon a large plateau to the north of the desert where the other images were arrayed. She looked down at the seat where the quipu was laid and suddenly a correlation leapt into life before her. Ethan watched as she reached down and rearranged the various pendents of the quipu to match the orientation and shape of the hummingbird on the rocks far below and to his amazement the different lengths of the quipu lines matched the size of the wings and tail of the bird.
‘It’s perfect,’ Lopez muttered in disbelief.
‘All but for one feature,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘The quipu image doesn’t have a beak.’
‘Yes it does,’ Lucy replied in awe as she reached down and took the very longest pendent of the quipu and hooked it back from its current position at the rear of the bird so that it crossed the body of the hummingbird and ended as the beak, a perfect representation of the geoglyph in the desert far below them.
‘I need a compass,’ Lucy said hurriedly.
‘There’s one in the cockpit,’ Ethan informed her, and without hesitation Lucy dashed past and hurried up to the cockpit, Ethan in pursuit.
‘It’s the hummingbird,’ she said excitedly to Arnie. ‘I need to know which direction it points.’
Arnie glanced out of the window to his left and saw the hummingbird motif on the desert floor far below. He took the controls from Yin and guided the Catalina through a wide turn as he set up to fly directly overhead the image in the direction of the beak.
‘Stand by,’ he said as the Catalina slowly lined up with the tail and beak of the bird.
Ethan watched as the Catalina descended below scattered cumulus cloud and the image of the huge hummingbird loomed into view on the desert below, the aircraft pointing directly in the same direction as the hummingbird’s beak.
‘Zero-three-zero degrees,’ Arnie informed Lucy as he glanced at the Catalina’s magnetic compass among the instruments before him on the control panel.
Lucy sat down in the cockpit’s jump-seat and with a map, ruler and pencil she marked the position of the hummingbird on the map and then drew a line heading away on a magnetic heading of zero-three-zero. The line traced across the wilderness and plunged deep into the Andes mountains, but Lucy shook her head.
‘What’s wrong?’ Ethan asked.
‘It doesn’t point anywhere,’ Lucy explained in confusion. ‘There’s nothing up there in that part of the mountains.’
Ethan peered past her out of the cockpit windows as Arnie banked the Catalina over the hummingbird’s massive form below them. Beside it was a line that looked like a wide runway, narrow near the hummingbird and widening as it extended away at an angle very close to that of the hummingbird’s beak.
‘What about that line? Could that have anything to do with it?’ he asked Lucy.
Lucy looked out of the window but she seemed none the wiser as the Catalina turned. It was Arnie’s voice that reached them from the front of the cockpit.
‘I’m not one for your crackpot theories, but there is something known as magnetic declination. It’s the difference between true North, and the position of the magnetic North Pole. Your Inca friends of centuries ago probably would have had no knowledge of the magnetic North Pole, only the position of true North via the stars. Our compass points towards the magnetic North Pole and the magnetic declination in this part of the world is negative six degrees west, which would match that line alongside the hummingbird’s beak. Why not adjust your line on the map and see where it points then?’
Lucy stared wide-eyed at the pilot, her jaw dropping. ‘Arnie, you’re a genius.’
‘I keep saying it,’ Arnie agreed with a shrug.
Lucy redrew the line and Ethan could see her shiver with excitement as she jabbed the pencil at a point on the map.
‘The quipu’s knots state that it would take six days travel in the indicated direction to reach the destination it pointed to. Do you know what this line reaches at about six days travel in the indicated direction?’
Ethan leaned over to see the map and instantly recognise the name she had scribbled beside a cross deep in the Andes mountains.
‘Macchu Picchu,’ Ethan said, ‘the last citadel of the Inca Empire.’
‘And the site that Hiram Bingham III found and excavated over a hundred years ago. We have to go there, right now,’ Lucy said to Arnie.
Arnie through a mock salute over his shoulder as the Catalina levelled out on course toward the north-east.
XXX
The Catalina touched down onto the sparkling waters of the lake, the aircraft trembling as it thundered across the waves and then began to slow. Less than a mile across at its widest point, the lake was surrounded by rolling hills and ramshackle sheds on its southern shore. Ethan could see evidence of basic housing and two or three parked vehicles nearby, children rushing out toward the aircraft as it taxied in toward the shore.
Arnie swung the Catalina around using the rudder and asymmetric thrust from its port engine to bring it alongside a rickety-looking jetty that poked out into the water.
‘At least we’re not going to get wet this time,’ Lucy observed as they unstrapped from their seats.
Arnie shut down the engines and clambered from the cockpit as Ethan and his companions assembled near the exit doors. Outside, Ethan could hear children’s feet hammering down the jetty and could see through the windows two elderly looking Peruvian men move alongside the aircraft and look up at it in wonder as Arnie opened the doors. A waft of clear mountain air breezed into the Catalina’s hot interior as Arnie climbed from the aircraft onto the jetty with a rope and loosely tied it around one of several posts nearby before hurrying up to the front of the aircraft, where Yin had climbed up to one of the cockpit hatches and hurled a second rope out to secure the aircraft’s bow.