I wait on a corner near Nasca, Peru because I had seen buses leaving from there in the general direction desired. Lucky from the first, a driver calls out "Cantalloq". Ah, si exacto. Vamos. We bounce over centuries old irrigation canals, the life blood of the tiny adobe built villages. At the farthest point, where the road loops back around, I ask to get off. The driver and several passengers suddenly concerned begin to offer advice that would take me back to where the tourists know to go. I smile my no thanks and explain that I am going to pray on Cerro Blanco. Well then, that's alright, now I am a perigrino, a pilgrim to the sacred White Mountain. The locals are appeased if a bit amazed that a gringo perigrino would find his way into the labyrinth of the desert mountains. The habit of following my heart often works out well.

Climbing off the road I first weave my way up graves left open by the robbers looking for ancient artifacts. The locals compete with archeologists in this ghoulish habit. A pleasant morning's stroll among the pits and scattered bits of human bones, here a jaw, there a hip, along with scraps of ancestral long hair and burial shrouds.

Outside of the Nasca Lines protected zone I hike up a dry wash where an old road pretends to make its way to a primitive mine, long ago played out. No chance now of shade or water, in a decade this desert receives perhaps a half inch of miserly drizzled rain. In time enough to still be enjoying the early morning's heat I arrive at the hill I seek, a sacred site, in the old tongue a huaca. From here the desert etched lines radiate out in several directions. The Nasca lines were created by laboriously removing the dark upper layer of stones exposing the lighter soil below. Most of the thousands of straight, sometimes miles long Nasca lines connect and terminate at hills like this one. Some hills have so many lines radiating from them that they look like a star burst, perhaps there is good reason in the similitude. Many of the lines cross each other creating a vast web, a unique power grid available to those sensitive to subtle earth energies. I do so deeply enjoy dancing my meditations in the midst of these, taking care not to step on or across the lines because the weave of walking destroys the straight line perfection in this sensitive soil. On this hill and others nearby are unusual stones arranged in circles of about 15 feet in diameter. The circles lay overlapping something like the pattern being called the flower of life. Also predominate here are the immense trapezoidal shapes, triangles stretched to an elongated point like giant needles in the dust.

No one seems to know now what the lines were created for, no one that is talking anyway. I enjoy entertaining the idea that these are energy collectors, amplifiers and transmitters. Perhaps they were originally aligned to astrophysical events. Imagine opening your soul in prayer at the receiving point of a trapezoid stretched across the desert, whose broad opposite end is aligned with the constellation into which the equinox sun is rising into the change of an age. Oh, YES!

A computer program was run to check this theory but it was only checked to the time of the later Nasca culture. This is something I consider a common mistake of the academic establishment. Normally bits of rubbish are carbon dated at the site giving us scientific data pin pointing when the rubbish was left but not necessarily the date of the site's construction. I prefer the histories as given by the wisdom keepers of the traditional cultures. In Nasca the native historians have stated that the lines were made by Wiracochas.

The Wiracochas are the stuff of legends. Tall, bearded and white skinned they were the builders of the city and civilization of Tiwanacu and perhaps of pre-Inca Machu Picchu and Cusco. They were able to shape and move many miles blocks of stone weighing in excess of 400 tons! Just the upper, above ground levels of Tiwanacu's ruins have been dated to be at least 9,000 years old, through the science of archeo-astronomy. Though depending how the game of numbers is played they may be 15-17,000 years old. This is information that opens a massive can of worms regarding the history of advanced civilizations. These are dates that place the Wiracochas before and just after the world cataclysmic shift of the last ice or displacement of the crust -- time events which are upheld by Andean legend/histories. Andean legend also tells of the Wiracocha´s flying machines, which when applied to the Nasca lines makes sense.

Pre-dating the numerous straight lines on the Nasca plain are gigantic zoomorphic figures, some more than 600 feet long. Drawn with great artistic skill and beauty using only one continuous line, the patterns can not be fully made out from anywhere close to ground level. Twelve of these figures seem to fit well into the zodiacal constellations, at least no worse than the classic Greek/Summerian figures. The Nasca figures coincide with the monthly activities in the Andean calendar of planting and harvest, which was also a gift of the Wiracochas. Were these figures part of a gigantic calendar? Could they be marking important events of the past? Or like the messages pre-Mayan Meso-America and pre-dynastic Egypt that are just now beginning to be decoded perhaps they are pointing out important events in our future, if we could but develop the skills and open minds to read them. Perhaps if the computers would check the star patterns closer to the era of the Wiracochas a greater alignment would be found.

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So now I meditate on this hill connected with the vast web laid across the desert, too dense to read the greater message but sensitive enough to enjoy the energy bath. A few miles away on the grid are the pyramids of Cahuachi. A complex of temples that show signs of at times hosting some 50,000 pilgrims. Just recently a Nasca native had taken me there and we shall be returning with an elder to invoke again the ancient ceremonies. That their ancestors came through the desert on foot attests to the amount of respect they had for the power of this place. Me too, I am a far traveled pilgrim and am feeling well rewarded for my efforts. The natives on the bus also seemed pleased by my pilgrimage.

Behind me shines Cerro Blanco. All around are the stark dark hills of rock sun baked black with a desert varnish. Unique, Cerro Blanco the white mountain tops the hills of it's black base with a massive dune of pale sand rising 4,000 ft. above the desert floor. The sand of the dune mountain is deposited by strong winds from the coast. Five years ago the Grandmother of the Nasca family that I was staying with told me that Cerro Blanco is the most powerful and sacred of the mountains overlooking the Nasca lines. A natural pilgrim and a sucker for sacred sites at first light I set my sandals in those sands. In the cool of the morning the sand was deliciously warm so the sandals soon came off, a barefoot pilgrimage is one truly in touch. The pureness of the dune mountain was broken only by scattered shards of pottery left by pilgrims of ages past. The ceremonial vessels usually carried chicha, corn beer, or sea water carried laboriously from far, honoring where the ancestors and Wiracochas came from. The pots were broken as part of the offering. One native told me of their ancestors' practice of mixing gold dust into the clay of their ceramics and on the sacred mountain I saw much gold fleck in the shards.

The heat rose with the day. Nearing the peak, for fun I jumped far off a crest onto a steep sand slope but the dune had been faced to the sun since the day's first rays and I sank up over my ankles in sand that was way too hot. There ensued a desperate shuffle slog as fast as I could across the unstable dune face, backsliding half as much as I gained in most unchristian manner. When finally I cleared the hot side the dance continued as I hopped about on my sand scorched feet. When I stopped there right before my toasted toes lay a four directional cross carved in white stone, nearly invisible in the pale sand. Perhaps my stomping around had unearthed it, how long ago had some pilgrim offered it to the mountain? Then came a condor, he completely circled giving me the eye, at eye level from just a few yards away. Well this certainly seemed like a good time to pay attention to the signs but while enjoying being awestruck, until later I didn't know what all this meant.

Then on the peak I enjoyed hours of prayer, meditation and sacred dance. As I finished there came a large dragonfly and to make itself clear it repeatedly got right in my face. That one I understood as a reaffirmation of the magic I had been involved in with a woman of the Yaqui tribe in Arizona. That one was easy because she had told me that it would be the dragonfly, still it was astonishing that the connection would choose this moment to assert itself. When reading signs we especially pay attention when things act out of character. Here I was high on mountain peak deep in the dry, dry desert, that water loving dragonfly had traveled some unusual distance to deliver it's message.