The Nazca Lines are hundreds of animals, plants and straight lines scratched into the surface of a desert plateau in southern Peru some two thousand years ago, each figure so large that it cannot be seen whole from the ground, and they were made by a people who never saw them from above. The Nazca drew by removing the dark, sun-baked stones from the pale ground beneath, and in a desert with almost no rain or wind the lines have stayed for two millennia: a hummingbird 90 metres across, a monkey with a spiral tail, a spider, a condor, a figure the tour trade renamed the astronaut, which the researcher who studied it knew as the owl man, and dozens of straight lines and trapezoids running for kilometres across the pampa. The way to see them is from a small plane out of Nazca town, which circles a dozen figures in about half an hour, tipping its wing hard over each one so every passenger looks straight down; the ride is short, low and rough, and the figures appear one after another exactly as drawn.
Nobody knows for certain why. The lines may have been walked in ceremonies, pointed at water sources, or asked the gods for rain in a desert where rain is everything; what is known is that the Nazca scaled them up from small sketches using stakes and cords, and that they came out accurate. For over forty years the German mathematician María Reiche lived beside the lines, cleared them by hand with a broom, and campaigned until the site was protected, and her house on the pampa is a museum. A steel tower beside the Pan-American Highway is the only way to see figures without a plane, looking down on the Tree and the Hands, and the highway runs straight through a lizard. In 2018 a lorry drove off the road onto the pampa and left tyre scars across three of the lines; the ground keeps everything, including the damage. Nazca is a drawing the size of a plain, and its makers never saw the picture.