What the Desert Keeps

There is something strange about traveling by boat to look at a geoglyph in a desert. Stranger still when nobody can tell you with certainty who made it, when they made it, or exactly what they intended it to mean.

Off the coast of Paracas, the Candelabro de Paracas appears as an enormous figure incised into a barren slope. Its age, original purpose, and precise meaning remain unresolved. Those uncertainties should have made the object less communicative. Instead, before I knew what the Candelabro meant, I already knew something else: someone had meant something.

Looking at it, my own mind traveled very far away, to India and the Ramayana. The resemblance I noticed to a three-branched marker described in the Kishkindha Kanda was interesting, but it was not evidence of historical contact. The Candelabro had said nothing about India. I had brought India with me.

From Paracas to cultivated Ica, Huacachina’s oasis, and the dunes beyond it, the field became a study of what remains and what is remade—physical marks, agricultural practices, legends, identities, and the meanings travelers bring with them. What the desert keeps is not always the thing itself. Sometimes it keeps a form.