The overwhelming challenge of translating the Nazca drawings is that there are far more false clues than real ones. Hundreds of animal figures and thousands of shapes proliferate the desert canvas like prehistoric graffiti, the majority of which were not created by the original artist of Nazca. Rectangles, triangles, trapezoids, cluster, and impossibly straight lines, some over 25 miles in length, are spread over 200 square miles of dun-colored flats. Add to these the humanlike figures carved into the surrounding hillsides, and you can see how daunting our task was. Nevertheless, our efforts eventually helped segregate what we deemed to be the more vital etchings from the rest of the Peruvian epigraph.

It is the older, more intricate drawings that hold the real message of Nazca. We can only guess at the date of their origins, but we know they are at least 1500 years old.

The hieroglyphs of Nazca serve two distinct functions. Icons we termed “primary” drawings are used to describe the story behind the doomsday prophecy, while “secondary” figures etched in proximity to these icons provide us with important clues to help decipher their meaning.

The artist’s tale begins at the center of the desert canvas with a figure Maria had nicknamed the Nazca sunburst, a perfect circle consisting of 23 lines extending outward from its perimeter. One of these lines is longer than the rest, extending some 20 miles across the desert. A dozen years later, I would discover that this elongated line was precisely aligned to Orion’s belt. Shortly thereafter, Michael would locate an iridium canister buried at the heart of this mysterious starting point, the contents of which contained an ancient map of the world (see June 14,1990 entry). This parchment seem to identify the Yucatan Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico as the final battleground for the Armageddon to come.

Lying in close proximity to the sunburst is the Nazca spider. Its specific genus—Ricinulei, is one of the rarest in the world, and can only be found in some of the most inaccessible areas of the Amazon rain forest. Like the whales and monkey, the Nazca spider is another species not indigenous to the Peruvian desert. For this reason, we considered it to be a directional icon, in this case, celestial by nature. It turns out the spider is an incredibly accurate terrestrial marker designed to direct the observer (again) to the constellation of Orion. The straight lines of the arachnoid have been oriented in such a way as to track the changing declinations of the three Orion belt stars, the same series of stars the Egyptians used to align the pyramids of Giza.