Nazca Lines

For thousands of years, I have been sleeping here, a secret drawing on the earth. I stretch across the dry desert floor in a place called Peru. The wind whispers over me, and the sun warms my lines, but if you were to walk right beside me, you might not even know I am here. That is because I am not just one picture, but hundreds of them. I am a hummingbird with a long beak, a monkey with a curly tail, and a spider with eight long legs. My shapes are so enormous that you can only see what I truly am if you float high above, like a bird soaring in the sky. Imagine drawing a picture so big that you need wings to see it all at once. That is my secret. I am a giant mystery waiting to be seen from above, a collection of pictures etched into the land itself.

I am the Nazca Lines. The clever Nazca people made me a very, very long time ago, sometime between the years 500 BCE and 500 CE. That is so far in the past that there were no cars or computers yet. The Nazca people did not have giant tools or machines to create me. Instead, they worked together with their hands and simple tools. They carefully scraped away all the dark, reddish pebbles from the surface of the desert. Underneath those pebbles was lighter, sandy ground. By clearing paths of dark pebbles, they drew my bright lines, like using an eraser on a dusty chalkboard to make a picture appear. But why did they make me. That is my biggest mystery. Some people think I was a giant calendar to help them know when to plant their crops by watching the sun and stars. Others believe I was a message or a prayer to the gods in the sky, asking them for rain to make their food grow in the dry desert. Nobody knows for sure, and that makes me even more special.

For many, many centuries, I lay here, hidden in plain sight. People walked the desert, but they were too close to see my giant animal and plant shapes. I was a secret known only to the sun and the stars. Then, in the 20th century, something amazing happened. People invented airplanes. For the first time, they could soar through the sky just like the birds. As pilots flew high over the Nazca desert, they looked down and their eyes opened wide with surprise. There I was. My monkey, my lizard, and my hummingbird, all looking up at them. It was a fantastic discovery. Today, people from all over the world come to fly in planes and helicopters to see my pictures. I am a timeless riddle on the land, a beautiful puzzle that connects today's world to the people who imagined me so long ago. I remind everyone that there are always amazing wonders to find, and that art can send a message across thousands of years.