Hello, can someone help me to summarise this text whitout including opinion, repetition, minor details, comments, imagery or exa
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In the Nazca desert of southern Peru you
can find the largest picture gallery in the
world. But this is no ordinary display of art:
the drawings, a whole zoo of animals and birds,
are of monster size, laid out on the desert fl oor.
A giant condor has a wing-span of more
than 120 metres; a lurking spider is nearly
50 metres long. There’s a hummingbird with
a vast bill, a curly-tailed monkey, a splashing
whale, and many more birds, fi shes and strange
plant forms.
Because of their size, you can’t really see
the magnifi cent pictures at ground level. Only
when airborne can you appreciate the whole
wriggling, fl ying menagerie. They are highly
stylised outlines, resembling the shapes which
decorate the pottery of Indians who lived
around Nazca from BCE to around 900 CE.
They were made by the simple, if laborious,
method of removing the dark stone layer which
covers the desert, or pampa, and revealing the
light-coloured sand beneath. The accuracy of
the designs was probably achieved by skilful
scaling-up of much smaller versions.
The awe-inspiring pictures were not
discovered till 1941: they weren’t easy to spot,
since the desert winds had blown a thin dark
layer of pebbles over the markings. The big
puzzle is: why did Nazcas draw giant pictures in
the sand which they couldn’t see properly?
Perhaps they were for the gods, not humans,
to see: most have connections in Nazca
mythology with water, so they could have formed
a kind of prayer for rain. Another theory is that
the Nazcas gave their chieftains a burial ground
that could be seen from the sky. It has also been
argued that they had religious signifi cance.
These marvellous monuments continue to
intrigue and tantalise us; sadly, though, they
are very fragile, and careless tourists have
damaged a number of them. Now, the Peruvian
government has banned everyone from the
area where the best pictures are. Ironically,
therefore, the world’s biggest display of art can
only be seen from the air, as originally intended
but then lost sight of.
