Trail of Feathers by Tahir Shah

foreign tourists. I found it ironic that most Nazcans had never seen the Lines from the air; few could have afforded the flight. But most had no interest anyway in what they considered merely to be tourist bait. In Nazca, everyone was praying for the same thing: that the tourists would keep coming, and that it didn’t rain. One man told me that if it rained for more than two hours the Lines would be washed away.
    I set off early in the morning to cross the pampa. At the wheel of the tired old hatchback was Pepé’s eldest son, José-Luis. A Marlboro Man in the making, he had the greased back mop of hair, the fake Ray Bans, and had already mastered the wink. José-Luis agreed to take me to the vast burial ground at Majuelo if I’d tell him all I knew about English girls. He had heard, he said, that they favoured white handbags, which they danced around at the discotheque.
    We veered left, off the Pan-American Highway, down the only route which crosses the Nazca Lines. The even sound of rubber on tarmac was replaced by a grating noise, as the tyres cut into the basalt. The car filled with dust. On either side of the track the level planes stretched out like contours of the moon.
    As the hatchback jarred along, I thought about Pepé’s obsession with mummies. Although morbid, it wasn’t an unknown preoccupation. The shopkeeper had been right - you can learn a great deal from preserved bodies. But there’s more to mummies than meets the eye. Pepé was probably unaware of the West’s own fixation with mummies. We have all but forgotten their historical role in European medicine. For centuries nothing was regarded as more powerful a physic than powdered mummy. It was credited with curing all kinds of ailments, including rashes and migraine, palpitations, epilepsy and plague. Throughout the Middle Ages, European aristocrats would tuck a sachet of mummy powder into their sleeve. Any sign of malady, they’d guzzle the contents down. Even as recently as 1908, the German drugs company E. Merck were advertising ‘Genuine Egyptian Mummy, as long as supplies last, 17 Marks per kilogram’.
    Forty minutes after turning off the desert highway, we descended onto what looked like a parched riverbed. The banks were caked in dry compressed mud, as if the river had raged there only days before. But water couldn’t have run in that channel for centuries. We ploughed ahead, José-Luis driving at high speed like a getaway driver. He told me of his big plans - his dream was to open a hotel and bar. He’d buy a fleet of planes, he said, and give Senor Rodriguez some competition. Then the English girls with white handbags would be all over him.
    He guided the hatchback down an embankment and through a copse of warango trees. Beyond them was a farmstead. We left the car at a distance, and walked towards the low adobe buildings. A dog voiced our arrival from the shade. The campesino and his wife didn’t need the dog’s alarm. They had spotted our trail of dust long before. Emerging gingerly from behind a fence made from the branches of a thorn tree, they came to greet their visitors.
    The harsh desert existence had taken a dreadful toll. The man’s face was chapped like rawhide, its skin blistered from a life spent working in the open. The woman, too, was wizened long before her time. I learnt later that she was forty-eight. She looked more like eighty. A decade of pregnancy had stolen her youth. She had given birth to twelve children, five of whom were dead.
    José-Luis called out his name.
    ‘¡Amigo!’ cried the farmer. ‘My friend! ¿Cómo esta su padre? How’s your father?’ Pepé was well, he said, despite his bad luck. 
    ‘¿Sustol’ asked the farmer. 
    José-Luis nodded.
    We were ushered inside, out of the sun.
    The farmer, Juan, pulled a plastic sheet away from the best chair. Wiping away a residue of dust, he motioned me to sit. The heat made conversation almost too much work. I admired a poster of Princess Diana, pinned