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above the Ingenio valley was more suitable than any other for making clearly recognisable markings that would survive the centuries. The reason was that it only rains for an average of twenty minutes a year in the Nazca region. Otherwise a dry, hot climate prevails. Weathering is done by the sand- bearing wind which also carries away all loose material lying on the surface, leaving behind only pebbles which continually break up owing to the great differences in temperature. Moreover, the so- called ‘desert varnish’, which has a brown glint after oxidisation, has formed on them. In order to make the gigantic drawings show .up, the constructors only had to remove the dark surface stones and scratch up the light subsoil of fine alluvial material. But who made the pictures and why did they make them so big that one can only get an overall impression of them from a great height, for example from an aircraft? Did they already possess a highly developed system of surveying by means of which they transferred their small-scale plans to a gigantic scale with absolute accuracy? Maria Reiche says: 'The designers, who could only have recognised the perfection of their own creations from the air, must have previously planned and drawn them on a smaller scale. How they were then able to put each line in its right place and alignment over large distances is a puzzle that So far scholars have taken far too little notice of the phenomena on the pampa of Nazca. At first they thought that the dead straight lines were old Inca roads or irrigation channels. Both explanations are nonsensical! Why should 'roads' begin in the middle of a plain and then suddenly come to a stop? If the lines were roads, why should they intersect in a system of coordinates? And why are they laid out towards points of the compass when the purpose of roads is to reach earthly goals by the shortest possible route? And why should irrigation canals be in the form of birds, spiders and snakes? Maria Reiche, who has worked the longest and most extensively on solving the secret of the Nazca plain and has written about it in her book Secret of the Desert, published in 1968, rejects these interpretations. She thinks it much more likely that the drawings are connected with the calendar, besides having a religious meaning. In her view the ground markings are observations of the heavens meant to be handed down to posterity in an indestructible form. However, she makes the following reservation: ‘It is not absolutely certain if it is possible to interpret all the lines astronomically, for there are some (including many north-south lines) which could not have corresponded to any star appearing on the horizon during the period in question. any of them." I know that Maria Reiche does not share my interpretation of the geometrical drawings at Nazca, because the results of her investigations to date do not justify such daring conclusions. In spite of that will take us many years to solve.’ But if it was intended to draw the position of constellations not only on but also above the horizon, there would be so many possible explanations of the lines that it would be extremely difficult to prove I should like to be allowed to expound my theory. At some time in the past unknown intelligences landed on the uninhabited plain near the present-day