meat and fried yuca chips – which were like potato only sweeter. The room had a bare tiled floor and a fan, and led directly onto the veranda. The professor was at the head of the table. Now that Matt could examine her more closely, he saw she was a large, rather masculine woman, though not as unattractive as he had first thought. She looked like the sort of woman who should have been teaching gym at an expensive girls’ school. She had changed into white trousers and a baggy white shirt tucked in at the waist. She had a bottle of iced beer in one hand, a thin cigar in the other. The smell of its smoke hung around them.
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” Professor Chambers said. “You’re welcome to my house.”
“Nice place,” Richard muttered.
“I was fortunate to be able to buy it. I’ve made a certain amount of money out of writing books. About Peru – and in particular the Nazca Lines.”
“What are the Nazca Lines?” Matt asked.
Chambers puffed on her cigar and the tip glowed an angry red. “I find it astonishing that you haven’t heard of them,” she remarked. “They just happen to be one of the great wonders of the ancient world. I’m afraid it’s all part of this dumbing down. English schoolchildren! They don’t seem to teach you anything these days.”
“I haven’t heard of them either,” Richard said.
“Bizarre!” The professor swallowed smoke the wrong way and burst into a fit of coughing. She took another swig of beer and sat back in her chair. “Well, I’m not going to give you a history lesson. Not yet, anyway. First I want to know about you. I got a telephone call from a very special friend. Apparently you’ve been to Vilcabamba?”
Nobody said anything. They didn’t know how much she knew.
“I’m green with envy!” Professor Chambers exclaimed. “I know that the Incas survived. They consider me their friend and I’ve spoken with them frequently. But I’ve never been to their lost city. As far as I know, nobody has – unless they have pure Inca blood – apart from you three.” Then she nodded at Matt and Pedro. “They must think very highly of you. I can assure you, it’s a great honour.”
“They are Gatekeepers,” Atoc muttered. He seemed offended by the way Professor Chambers had spoken.
“Gatekeepers! Yes, of course! Two of the Five! The Old Ones…”
“You know about that too?” Richard asked.
“I know a great deal about a great many things, Mr Cole.” She reached forward and took a grape from a bowl, then flicked it out of the window. A large tropical bird swooped down and caught it. “And yes, I had heard stories about the Mad Monk of Cordoba and this alternative history of his. I was never sure whether to believe it or not, but now that these children have turned up, I suppose I better had! Now what about this page of yours? The one from the diary?”
Matt had it in his pocket. He took it out and gave it to her. She read it briefly once, then again. “Well, some of this is fairly straightforward,” she said. “The place of Qolqa. Inti Raymi, that’s only two days from now. Doesn’t leave us a lot of time. I’m not sure about this white bird, though. It could be a condor, I suppose…”
“What about a swan?” Matt said.
“A swan? What makes you think of that?”
“I heard Salamanda talking about a swan,” he explained. He could have mentioned his dream but decided not to. “He said it’s to be in position. At midnight.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Professor Chambers had irritated Matt and she saw it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that it seems so unlikely. There’s a condor and a hummingbird in the Nazca Desert. You saw them this morning. But there’s no swan. As far as I know, there are no swans in Peru.”
“That’s what he said,” Matt insisted.
“What about the rest of the poem?” Richard asked.
“Well, the whole page refers to the Nazca Lines. There’s no doubt about that. The place of Qolqa, for example…” She stopped herself. “There’s no point talking about the Nazca Lines until you know what they are, so I’m going to give you a history lesson after all. It would take me a week to describe them to you, and even then I would only scratch the surface. But we don’t have a week. And anyway, young people these days have no concentration. So let me try and put it as simply as I can.”
Professor Chambers got up and helped herself to another beer, flicking the cap off with a penknife. Matt was almost surprised that she didn’t use her teeth.
“There are many mysteries in the world,” she began. “Even now, in the twenty-first century. Stonehenge. The Pyramids. Uluru, in Australia. There are all sorts of places and things – some of them man-made, some of them natural – that science can’t explain. But if you ask me, the Nazca Lines are the biggest mystery of the lot.
“Let’s start with the Nazca Desert. It’s huge. It’s hot. And it’s empty. About two thousand years ago, the ancient Indians of Nazca decided to trudge out here and draw a series of extraordinary pictures in the ground. They did this by removing the darker stones from the surface of the desert and exposing the lighter soil underneath. There’s almost no rain in Nazca and very little wind. That’s how the lines have survived.
“Are you with me so far?” She glanced at Atoc, who was translating rapidly for Pedro. He nodded.
“Good. Well, some of these pictures are very beautiful. You saw them from the plane. There are animals – a whale, a condor, a monkey, a hummingbird and a huge spider. And there are triangles, spirals and star shapes, as well as hundreds of perfectly straight lines, some of them stretching for up to twenty-five miles.”
She took a quick swig of beer.
“Now, this is where the mystery begins. The Nazca Lines can only be seen from the air! In fact, they were only discovered in 1927 when one of the first aeroplanes in Peru flew over them. I wish I’d been on board, that’s all I can say! Anyway, obviously the Nazcan people didn’t have planes. So the question is – why go to all the trouble of making the lines and the pictures if they’d never be able to see them?
“There have been all sorts of theories,” Professor Chambers went on. “One writer believed that the lines were some sort of airport for spaceships from another planet. It’s true that one of the pictures does show a man with a round head and some people believe it to be an astronaut. A lot of people think they were drawn for the benefit of the ancient gods. They would be up in the sky, so they’d be able to see them. My own feeling has always been that they are in some way connected to the stars… perhaps they were used to forecast stars. Or perhaps…” She paused. “I’ve often wondered if they weren’t put there to warn us about something.”
Her cigar glowed red. Smoke crept up the side of her face. She seemed to be deep in thought. But then, abruptly, she sat down again.
“Many theories. But the point is – nobody knows for sure.”
“Is the place of Qolqa in the desert?” Matt said.
“Yes, it is.” Professor Chambers nodded. “Once again, you should have seen it from the plane. Qolqa is a word in Quechua, the ancient language of Peru. It means ‘granary’. And it’s the name given to the great rectangle we flew over this morning.”
“Before the place of Qolqa…” Matt read out the second line of the poem. “That means the gate must be in front of the rectangle!”
“It may not mean anything of the sort!” the professor snapped. “There is no gate in the desert. That is to say, there are no standing stones, no markers, no buildings. There’s just the earth and the lines.”
“But there’s a platform,” Matt returned. “Salamanda said he needed to find the platform.”
“Well, good luck to him. I’ve been into the desert a thousand times and I’ve never seen a platform.” Professor Chambers tapped ash into a saucer on the table. “Mind you, it could be buried,” she muttered. “I suppose that’s always a possibility.”
“Are you sure there’s no swan?” Richard asked.
The professor slammed down her cigar, extinguishing it. “Mr Cole!” she exclaimed. “The day I began studying the Nazca Lines, you were still in nappies. How dare you suggest…?”
Matt thought she was going to throw something at the journalist, but she forced herself to calm down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you have to understand. The Nazca Lines are my life, which is to say, I’ve devoted my whole life to them. I visited them for the first time when I was twenty-three years old and since then, they’ve never let me go. Can you understand that? There are so few things left in the world that we don’t know. Science has explained everything away. And yet here we have one of the last, great mysteries. A whole desert filled with
