and she feels it is dying with her: âItâs very sad now . . . very reduced!â
Other dressmakers are divided into friends, foes, and those consigned to a limbo of indifference. She cherishes the memory of Balenciaga, â Un ami . . . un vrai!â On the subject of Christian Dior she was vague: âHe had a pretty name, but I did not know him.â And of Madame Chanel, who at one time must have galled her considerably, she had this to say: âShe was a woman of taste . . . Yes. One had to admit it. But she was a modiste. That is to say, my dear, she understood hats!â
On leaving her, I was worried that our photographer might disturb her tranquillity.
âNo. He will not disturb me. I shall be very pleased to see him. But he cannot photograph my brain . . . !â
Â
1973
MARIA REICHE: THE RIDDLE OF THE PAMPA
M aria Reiche is a tall, almost skeletal, German mathematician and geographer who has spent about half her seventy-two years in the Peruvian desert surveying the archaeological monument known as the âNazca linesâ. This astonishing curiosity lies on the Pan-American Highway some three hundred miles south-east of Lima and fifty miles inland from the coast, a flat waterless plain, lying high above two irrigated valleys, with the foothills of the Andean Cordillera backing up behind. This plain, the Pampa de Ingenio, is covered with a thin layer of sand and pebbles which has oxidised a warm brown colour on the surface. It has a texture rather like a meringue and overlies a bed of whitish alluvium. If you so much as tread on the Pampa you leave a white footprint that will last for centuries.
Nearly 2,000 years ago the local inhabitants realised they could use their pampa as a gigantic etching plate. And over the generations, they made what is surely the largest, and certainly one of the most beautiful, works of art in the world. The surface of the desert is furrowed with a web of straight lines, linking huge geometric forms â triangles, rectangles, spirals, meanders, whip-like zig-zags and superimposed trapezes â that look like the work of a very sensitive and very expensive abstract artist. There are lines as thin as a goat path, and as wide as airport runways. Some converge at a single point, others run on, five miles and more, straddling valleys and escarpments in their unswerving course. These surface drawings make little sense on the ground, and no aerial photographs do them justice. But from a light aircraft you can only gasp with amazement at their scale and the imagination of their makers.
As you bounce about the sky in the thermals that rise off the plain, you soon distinguish other figures. Apart from the geometric forms there is a zoo of animals and birds, looking rather like Steinberg drawings on an enormous scale. There is a whale. There are a guano-bird, a pelican, a humming bird, other unrecognisable birds and a frigate bird, with a distended sac under- its bill. There is a dog. There is an Amazonian spider-monkey with a prehensile tail curving upwards in a spiral. There is a copy of a spider (of a species called Ricinulei that copulates with its hind leg). There is a tom-toddy figure with head and no body; a flower; a strange kind of seaweed; and a beast, half-bird and half-snake. There is also a lizard with its body shorn in two by the highway.
The lines on the Pampa de Ingenio were spotted in the late Twenties by the Aerial Survey of Peru. But for more than ten years the archaeologists were either ignorant of their existence or chose to ignore them. In 1939 Dr Paul Kosok of Long Island University was surveying Ancient Peru and followed up a rumour of ancient irrigation channels on the Pampa. He found the mysterious lines and was doubly astonished when the figures of birds and animals emerged from under his footprints. Kosok was not perplexed by the origin of the figures. Their style roughly coincided with those that decorated the pots of the local
Other dressmakers are divided into friends, foes, and those consigned to a limbo of indifference. She cherishes the memory of Balenciaga, â Un ami . . . un vrai!â On the subject of Christian Dior she was vague: âHe had a pretty name, but I did not know him.â And of Madame Chanel, who at one time must have galled her considerably, she had this to say: âShe was a woman of taste . . . Yes. One had to admit it. But she was a modiste. That is to say, my dear, she understood hats!â
On leaving her, I was worried that our photographer might disturb her tranquillity.
âNo. He will not disturb me. I shall be very pleased to see him. But he cannot photograph my brain . . . !â
Â
1973
MARIA REICHE: THE RIDDLE OF THE PAMPA
M aria Reiche is a tall, almost skeletal, German mathematician and geographer who has spent about half her seventy-two years in the Peruvian desert surveying the archaeological monument known as the âNazca linesâ. This astonishing curiosity lies on the Pan-American Highway some three hundred miles south-east of Lima and fifty miles inland from the coast, a flat waterless plain, lying high above two irrigated valleys, with the foothills of the Andean Cordillera backing up behind. This plain, the Pampa de Ingenio, is covered with a thin layer of sand and pebbles which has oxidised a warm brown colour on the surface. It has a texture rather like a meringue and overlies a bed of whitish alluvium. If you so much as tread on the Pampa you leave a white footprint that will last for centuries.
Nearly 2,000 years ago the local inhabitants realised they could use their pampa as a gigantic etching plate. And over the generations, they made what is surely the largest, and certainly one of the most beautiful, works of art in the world. The surface of the desert is furrowed with a web of straight lines, linking huge geometric forms â triangles, rectangles, spirals, meanders, whip-like zig-zags and superimposed trapezes â that look like the work of a very sensitive and very expensive abstract artist. There are lines as thin as a goat path, and as wide as airport runways. Some converge at a single point, others run on, five miles and more, straddling valleys and escarpments in their unswerving course. These surface drawings make little sense on the ground, and no aerial photographs do them justice. But from a light aircraft you can only gasp with amazement at their scale and the imagination of their makers.
As you bounce about the sky in the thermals that rise off the plain, you soon distinguish other figures. Apart from the geometric forms there is a zoo of animals and birds, looking rather like Steinberg drawings on an enormous scale. There is a whale. There are a guano-bird, a pelican, a humming bird, other unrecognisable birds and a frigate bird, with a distended sac under- its bill. There is a dog. There is an Amazonian spider-monkey with a prehensile tail curving upwards in a spiral. There is a copy of a spider (of a species called Ricinulei that copulates with its hind leg). There is a tom-toddy figure with head and no body; a flower; a strange kind of seaweed; and a beast, half-bird and half-snake. There is also a lizard with its body shorn in two by the highway.
The lines on the Pampa de Ingenio were spotted in the late Twenties by the Aerial Survey of Peru. But for more than ten years the archaeologists were either ignorant of their existence or chose to ignore them. In 1939 Dr Paul Kosok of Long Island University was surveying Ancient Peru and followed up a rumour of ancient irrigation channels on the Pampa. He found the mysterious lines and was doubly astonished when the figures of birds and animals emerged from under his footprints. Kosok was not perplexed by the origin of the figures. Their style roughly coincided with those that decorated the pots of the local
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