The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(10)

From the air, they were stunning. White lines in the reddish-brown earth. Glyphs and animals and birds. Shapes she couldn’t understand. And there, the one she’d most wanted to see: the spider.

There were some scholars—crackpots, Melanie thought—who claimed that the lines were runways for ancient astronauts, or that the Nazca had made the designs with the aid of hot-air balloons, but the general consensus was that the Nazca had used earthly means. Archaeologists found stakes at the end of some of the lines, showing the basic techniques that had been used to make the designs. The Nazca had mapped them out first and then removed the darker colored rocks to the depth of less than half a foot, where the whitish ground stood underneath in stark contrast.

Even though she’d seen it before in pictures and drawings, the sight of the spider took her breath away. From the height of the single-engine airplane, the spider seemed small, though she knew it was close to one hundred fifty feet long, maybe longer, on the ground. She heard the pilot yell something and saw him circling his finger in the air, asking if she wanted him to stay over the spider for a few circuits, something they’d talked about in her terrible Spanish before taking off. She nodded and felt Manny’s hand on her shoulder. She put her fingers over his and realized she was crying. She hadn’t wanted to visit the spider out of a desire to see in real life what she’d read about. No, it was more than that, and the scientist in her cringed at the thought. She hadn’t told Manny because he would have sighed and they would have had another one of those endless conversations about the limits of science and biology and the question of adoption.

It was really only at that moment that she realized exactly why she had insisted on going to Peru. Insisted over Manny’s objections. Insisted that if they were going to go anywhere, it was going to be to see the Nazca Lines. She knew it was crazy. The rational, scientific part of her, the woman who had ground her way through her PhD research, who slept in her lab two or three nights a week and chased off graduate students who weren’t willing to work as hard as she was, knew her desire to haul Manny with her to Peru was the last desperate grasping of a woman in her late thirties who thought she could put off having children until she was ready and then discovered that maybe it had never even been an option. The trip was the longest of long shots, but once she’d read the theory put forth by one Nazca academic that the lines were ritual images, the birds and plants and spider symbols for fertility, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that maybe there was a reason she’d always been drawn to the image, that there in the Peruvian foothills, the spider had been waiting just for her.

Up in the plane, she’d wanted Manny with an urgency that had long been missing from their relationship. As much as she wanted to stay in the air, flying circuits over the image of the spider, she also couldn’t wait to be on the ground again, in the privacy of their tent, doing what she hoped would finally lead to the baby she thought might save their marriage.

She’d been wrong about both the baby and saving the marriage.

After she and Manny divorced, she still remembered the trip fondly. While they circled in the air she’d hastily drawn her own rendition of the Nazca spider:



After the divorce was finalized, she’d torn the page from her notebook, trimmed it neatly, and framed it. It was on the wall near her desk at the lab. It didn’t take her breath away as the actual lines carved into the earth had. There was something about the scale, the permanence, the way the lack of rain and wind had left the lines undisturbed for more than two thousand years that both rattled her and filled her with happiness. She liked thinking there might have been a woman like her, hoping desperately for a baby, pulling rocks from the ground nearly twenty-five hundred years ago.

Or longer.

“Ten thousand years,” Julie said. “Not twenty-five hundred.”

Melanie pulled at the collar of her shirt, but she wasn’t really thinking about the heat anymore. She recognized the first stirrings of intellectual engagement, the way that she could become consumed with curiosity. The fact that it was the Nazca Lines made it easier for her to get engaged, but the truth was that it had never been difficult to pique her interest. She’d gotten better about remembering to do things like eat meals, shower, and change her clothes—having a private bathroom in her office helped—but at heart, she was still the same research geek who was happiest in her lab trying to find the answer to a question. “Who?” she said. “Who’s telling you that the lines were made ten thousand years ago?”

“Not all of them,” Julie said. “Uh, and it’s a friend of mine, a guy I went to undergrad with.” Normally there’d be a little part of Melanie that would be interested in the gossip, would pry until Julie admitted he was somebody she’d slept with when she was nineteen or twenty, a guy she still carried a torch for, but she was starting to get impatient with these three graduate students. “He’s a grad student too, and he’s working on the site. Archaeology.”

“Of course.”

“Right,” Julie said, “so we e-mail back and forth kind of regularly, and I mentioned your theory to him.”

Melanie started walking again. This was getting tiresome. “What theory?”

“About the spider,” Bark said. He started to say something else, but Julie cut him off.

“One of the things they’re trying to figure out with the dig is if the lines were made in a compressed period of time all together—over years or a few decades—or spread out over a few hundred years. How long did they take to make? They’ve been able to find wooden stakes near most of the lines that they think might have been used almost like surveyor’s stakes by the Nazca when they were doing the designs. But he was working on the spider site and, sure enough, he found stakes. They had one dated.”