The Nazca Lines are hundreds of animals, plants and straight lines scratched into a desert plateau in southern Peru two thousand years ago, and none of the figures can be seen whole from the ground. They were made by lifting the dark, sun-baked stones off the pale floor underneath, so a line is a strip of uncovered ground, not a groove. On a plain this dry and still, nothing rubs it out. The makers worked from small sketches, fixing a centre point, stretching cords to marker posts and stepping off measured lengths until a drawing they could hold covered hundreds of metres. They had no way of standing back to check, and the shapes came out right. Many of them are a single unbroken line that never crosses itself, and they were probably walked as much as drawn.
The plane goes up from Nazca town and circles a dozen in half an hour, tipping a wing hard over each so you get a clear look straight down. The Hummingbird, long straight beak, is usually the first the pilot names for you, then the Monkey, its tail in a tight spiral and nine fingers on its hands. The Spider, 47 metres across, is the sharpest design on the pampa; the Condor runs over 130 metres beak to tail. One figure is cut into a hillside instead of the flat, thirty metres tall, so it faces you head-on. The tour trade calls it the astronaut; María Reiche, who spent forty years beside the lines clearing them by hand, knew it as the owl man. A steel tower beside the Pan-American Highway gives you the only view without a plane, angled, onto the Tree and the Hands. Everything that touches this ground joins it. In 2018 a lorry came off that highway and printed tyre scars a hundred metres long across three lines, and because the figures are made by moving stones, nothing goes back. The road is in the record too: pushed through the pampa in 1938, it cut the Lizard in half, and the tail lies on the far side.