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With a heart-stopping bang, the truck blew a tire on a deserted road a mile or two outside Jequetepeque, a tiny town in the coastal desert of northern Peru. As we lurched to a stop and stood contemplating our problem, the late afternoon sun cast long shadows through the scrub and trees that lined the side of the road before plunging rapidly below the horizon, leaving us in total darkness. What would have been a mere aggravation closer to home was rather more of an event in this setting. One of our party had been robbed at gunpoint by banditos not far from our location, and with the ravages of El Nino, a high level of anxiety among the natives was creating a rather unfavorable environment for invasores, or invaders, which included, whether we liked it or not, my little group of travelling companions. To make matters worse, the truck, a rental, did not appear to have a jack.

Arrival at this particular stretch of road at this particular time came about as a result of the suggestion of an archaeologist friend who argued that the Moche, a sophisticated culture that had inhabited the northern coastal desert of Peru from the first to the eighth centuries, would be perfect as the basis of the third in a series of archaeological mysteries I write.

The suggestion seemed appropriate enough. The Moche were, until the late 1980's, something of a mystery themselves, an almost forgotten footnote in the study of Peruvian antiquity, known largely by scholars, a few brief mentions in books devoted to those who came much later, the infinitely better known Inca.

But a spectacular discovery in 1987 near the little village of Sipan in the coastal desert of northern Peru changed all that. It is the kind of true story that as a fiction writer, I'd find difficult to top: the discovery of an untouched tomb by huaqueros, as grave robbers are called in that part of the world, a subsequent falling out among thieves, with one of the huaqueros, unsatisfied with his allotment of the find, reporting the others to the authorities, and the subsequent efforts of archaeologists, led by Dr. Walter Alva of the Bruning Museum in nearby Lambayeque, to save the site. The archaeological work was hampered by lack of funds and the antipathy of several members of the community, some of them the latest generation in a long line of huaqueros, but rewarded many times over with the discovery of not one, but three, untouched tombs.

What made the story of the discovery particularly fascinating was the way the individuals buried with such wealth and ceremony was identified. For the Moche had no written language that would explain the story of their culture to those of us who came much later. Instead, archaeologists, notably Dr. Christopher Donnan of The Fowler Museum of Cultural History, used the art and iconography on Moche ceramics -- until the discovery of Sipan, the only source of knowledge we had on their culture -- to solve the riddle of who was buried in the tombs.

The Moche excelled at exquisite fine-line drawings on stirrup-spout vessels that showed us both scene of daily life: fishing, hunting, childbirth and burials, and other activities not quite so easy to interpret. One eye-catching scene, the subject of much study, is one q in which an important person, a high priest or a king judging by the rays emanating from his shoulders, who has come to be called the Warrior Priest, sits on a litter with a dog at his feet, his royal banners around him. He is always dressed the same way, with a helmet-shaped head dress with a crescent-shaped ornament, crescent-shaped nose ornament, large ear spools, and a back flap. In the scene, he is handed a cup by a man with a face of a bird, the Bird Priest, who in turn is flanked by two other personages of some status, the Priestess, with hair that tends in serpent heads, and another individual with a feline face.

Below them are many men who can only be prisoners. They are naked, and their weapons, tied in neat little bundles, have been stripped from them. It is clear, on even cursory analysis, what will happen to them. Their throats will be slashed and their bodies dismembered. What happens next is the subject of much interpretation, but one possible, even likely, outcome is that their blood will find its way into the cup to be drunk by the warrior priest. The scene, depicted by more than one artist in much the way the crucifixion or the nativity has been illustrated over and over, has come to be called the Sacrifice Theme.

What was extraordinary about the first tomb excavated at Sipan was that the individual buried there had been laid to rest in the garb of the Warrior Priest, right down to a dog buried with him, with all the trappings of the office virtually identical to those depicted in the fineline drawings. And not just the Warrior Priest, either. A second tomb at Sipan revealed the Bird Priest, a man about thirty-five to forty-five, buried with elaborate grave goods and a spectacular owl head dress. Sometime later, at San Jose de Moro to the south, Christopher Donnan and Luis Jaime Castillo found the priestess.

The pieces of the mystery had fallen into place, the inescapable conclusion being that the people depicted in the drawings -- the Warrior Priest, the Bird Priest and the Priestess, and no doubt the others -- actually existed and held positions of great importance. Add to that the fact that the confiscated contents of the tomb originally discovered by the huaqueros in the same area were similar, if not identical to artifacts found in the professionally excavated tomb, suggested that over time, more than one person, likes presidents and kings, had held these titles. Furthermore, it was likely that the rituals depicted on the ceramic drawings had actually taken place: the deceased Warrior Priest had been buried with the ceremonial tumi blades often associated with ritual decapitation ceremonies, and the bird priest was buried with copper goblets the same shape as those in the drawings of the Sacrifice Ceremony.

This solution to a real life mystery , I couldn't resist. I began my personal search for the mysterious Moche in Lima, at the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera which houses what is touted as the largest collection of pre-Hispanic Peruvian art in the world. And it is an impressive collection, indeed. It was amassed and studied by Rafael Larco Hoyle from his family's sugar estate near Trujillo throughout his lifetime -- he died in 1966. It was Larco Hoyle who developed the now standard method of dating Moche ceramics by the spout on the most common ceramic, the stirrup-spout vessel.

While the exhibits themselves are interesting and informative, it is the storeroom, in which the visitor is permitted to wander, that really brings home the scope and power of Moche artistry. Rows and rows of industrial shelving are lined with thousands upon thousands of pre-Columbian ceramics. Larco Hoyle thought that the stirrup-spout ceramic vessel held some ritual importance, and it is easy to see why. The pots are fashioned in many shapes: animals, birds, fish, fruits and vegetables, striking portraits of all kinds of people, handsome and otherwise, warriors, commoners, fearsome anthropomorphic beasts, or just intricately drawn depictions of daily life, the ones that had proven so crucial in the identification of the deceased at Sipan, all topped by the characteristic spout.

What was very apparent to me was that the Moche was consummate craftspeople and artists. While much of their work was done for ritual purposes, if Larco Hoyle was right, the art was not dragged down by it; indeed it soared above it. When compared to cultures who had gone before them, and even more so to those, like the Inca, who had come later, the Moche stood out as the truly artistic. Their work is lively, funny in many cases, particularly a stunning collection of erotic ceramics housed at the museum, uses material with great skill -- in a serpent shaped vase, for example, the shape of the vase matches the coils of the serpent perfectly -- and takes older themes, but adds a new twist. When you look at similar work that came later, it is like looking at a poor copy of a great artist today. I came away quite enchanted.

My second visit was to the Museo de la Nacion, also in Lima, an imposing, rather bunker-like structure that houses the national collection. The featured exhibit at that time was the Royal Tombs of Sipan. Here were the contents of the tombs found so dramatically at Sipan, in all their breathtaking beauty. When Walter Alva and his team of archaeologists broke through to this tomb, they had found the richest burial ever excavated in the Western Hemisphere. There is more gold than one can imagine: helmets, masks, ear spools, scepters, bells, banners, several ceremonial knives, all made with the Moche attention to detail and the superb artistry I'd noticed earlier.

There were exquisite necklaces of every sort, with gold beads in the shape of peanuts, spiders, owls, human heads, feline heads, and more. There are helmets of gold and feathers, still preserved, ceremonial banners, black flaps, belts, nose ornaments, even sandals of gold and silver.

Despite the dazzling nature of the exhibit, this time I came away somewhat troubled. True, the Moche were artistically far superior to other cultures in that part of the world. Everything I had seen told me they were creative, inventive, imaginative and gifted. But their art also told me they were warlike, more than a little hierarchical, judging from the many trappings of office from the tomb, and, if the themes depicted on the ceramics are anything to go by, bloodthirsty in the extreme.

I found it difficult to equate the people who had created these masterpieces, with the people and scenes they had depicted. Not that I honestly believed that warfare, blood sacrifice and art cannot coexist. Obviously they can. Think Spain during the Inquisition, the blood rituals of the Maya at glorious Copan, or just about any culture you'd care to mention. Never one to be burdened by logic in such matters, however, I just didn't want the people who had created the marvellous objects I had so admired to be the warlike, violent people they must surely have been. And did I really want to write a mystery novel, which, after all, is supposed to be entertaining and maybe even fun, based on people who slit the throats of their captives and then drank the blood?

Don't be so judgmental, the little internal voice said. Go and see for yourself. And so, armed with an invitation to visit an archaeological project in Moche country, and eschewing the more popular tourist route to the south, to Cuzco, Arequipa and Machu Picchu, I headed north, determined to see firsthand where the Moche empire developed, flourished, and then, in the eighth century, mysteriously vanished.

Trujillo, about 340 miles north of Lima, was the starting point. With a population of 750,000, Trujillo lays claim to being the second or third largest city in Peru, depending on whose statistics you use, and is known for the beautiful wrought-iron grillwork that graces so many of its brightly-colored colonial-era buildings. Like so many other towns in Peru, it has its market, its cathedral, its cafes and museums (the university-run Museo de Arqueologia is a good one, though small), and the requisite Plaza de Armas, the central square.

Most people who come this far north want to see Chan Chan, a huge ruined city that was the capital of the Chimu empire, built about 1300 AD, and the largest mud brick city in the world. That, with two smaller complexes called Haul Arco Iris and Haul Emerald (haul is a native word for sacred place) give the visitor a very good idea of the magnificence of the Chimu culture, and are easily accessible from Trujillo's central core.

For me, the appeal of Trujillo was its proximity to the place where the Moche culture can be said to have begun. There were many peoples who populated the northern coastal desert of Peru, with archaeological evidence of habitation dating back 10,000 years. But sometime around the first century, a group of people we now call the Moche -- although we have no idea what they called themselves -- coalesced as a political entity and became the first to establish political hegemony over an approximately 330 mile stretch of desert from the Huarmey River valley in the south, to the Piura Valley in the north. They ruled from a capital built on the slopes of Cerro Blanco in the Moche River area, the river that gave them the name by which we know them today. There they built a magnificent city dominated by two pyramids, or huacas, the remains of which can still be seen. The largest is called Huaca del Sol, a temple to the sun, a huge structure rising from the desert floor that would have contained 100 million mud bricks when completed, the largest solid adobe brick structure in the world. Nearby is the smaller Huaca de la Luna, the temple to the moon, built up against the face of Cerro Blanco, or White Hill. A few miles further afield is the ruined huaca called El Brujo, the witch doctor.

It is difficult to adequately describe the power of these sites. Somehow the objects in the museums, cleaned, restored, and displayed so beautifully, do not entirely prepare you for the real experience. Both Cerro Blanco and El Brujo are a little off the beaten track, El Brujo in particular, and not necessarily the kind of place the lone traveller, especially a woman, should go unaccompanied. It is necessary to go early in the day, before the wind comes up and whips the dust into stinging, suffocating missiles.

The route takes the visitor off the highway on to side roads, then dirt roads, and finally to mere tracks marked off by white-washed stones every few yards. The huacas look much like mud hills, their summits melted by succeeding El Ninos, their sides riven with deep vertical gouges where the rains have flowed in periodic deluges over the centuries since they were abandoned. Even then they are impressive, particularly Huaca del Sol, which still rises 125 feet above the desert floor.

The terrain at the foot the huacas, even in daylight, looks eerily like a moonscape, the surface pockmarked by hundreds of depressions, the legacy of centuries of looting, and littered with broken pottery shards, slivers of bone, and even, here and there, the scrap of textile from a shroud, or a plait of dark hair, bleached red by centuries in the sun. Hair lasts thousands of years, my archaeologist/guide said. It seemed inexplicably sad to see it lying there in the sand.

Inside both the Huaca de la Luna and El Brujo, under the corrugated roofs that protect the archaeological work underway, hints of the magnificence of Moche civilization are being painstakingly uncovered. In Huaca de la Luna, one can see the walls of a large area lined with murals with an extraordinary repetitive pattern, a fearsome god often referred to as the Decapitator, fangs bared, eyes bulging. There is much to admire: the grandeur of the structure, the engineering genius it took to build it. Still, I couldn't help wondering, was it here the prisoners of the Sacrifice Ceremony, frightened and humiliated, were brought to be sacrificed? Is that why the Decapitator is drawn almost hypnotically over and over again on these walls?

And El Brujo? There a large ceremonial plaza is lined with murals depicting naked men roped together, their arms tied behind them, their weapons stripped from them. It is a powerful image, larger than life, one that makes it almost impossible not to believe the sacrifice theme is real, and that here the ritual was enacted in real life, the cup filled with the blood of sacrifice, then passed from the Priestess with hair of snakes, to the Bird Priest, then on to the Warrior on his litter, his dog at his feet.

You can understand why most archaeological projects in that part of Peru require the services of a witch doctor, a shaman, to protect the workers from whatever spirits may still lurk there. It is a relief in many ways to emerge near the top of the pyramid to see the blue of the sea on one direction, the purple and black of the Andes in the other, and off in the distance between the two, the bleached houses of a little town.

It is from the top of the pyramid that you begin to understand what a remarkable achievement the Moche Empire was. The Moche commanded a narrow strip of some of the driest desert in the world, except, of course, when it is being ravaged by flashfloods, located between the sea, to the west, and the Andes to the east. There are no foothills here, just a wall of rock rising straight up from the desert floor a few miles inland.

It is also, geologically speaking, one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. Here the ocean plate pushes under the continental plate at a rate far exceeding anywhere else, making the area a prime center for earthquakes. Despite these conditions, the Moche gained control of the river valleys, built mammoth, and essential, irrigation systems to bring water from the mountains down to the desert for immense agricultural projects, fished some of the richest waters in the world off the coast in tortora red boats, of a design still used by Peruvian fishermen today, and established political control over the whole area. They built huge ceremonial centers from mud bricks, espoused a rich ritual life, and had a social structure able to support a class of artisans and craftsmen, weavers, potters, metalworkers, painters, carvers of wood and bone. From the vantage point of the pyramid, it looked to be an extraordinary and difficult achievement, in an essentially hostile environment.

Leaving the relative comforts of Trujillo behind, I boarded a Vulkano bus from the bus station near the stadium, and headed further north on the Panamericana highway. My goal was to eventually reach Sipan itself, to see the site where the tombs were found, but also to explore the route along the way, to see a Peru far from the usual tourist destinations.

From Trujillo north to Chiclayo, the next sizable town to the north, the Panamericana runs on a relatively straight track right through the desert. Little towns, all with their markets and plazas, and with romantic names like Pacasmayo, Pacatnamú, San Jose de Moro, and the aforementioned Jequetepeque, are strung like tiny beads along the highway. From time to time the highway crosses a dry river bed, or dips a little closer to the sea. The bus stops in the towns and at markers on the highway; people board and leave, although it is difficult to see where they might be going. Sometimes all there is to be seen are tire tracks heading straight across the desert toward the Andes, just a few miles away.

For several days I explored the area, stopping to visit an archaeological project and exploring the countryside, as I worked my way north to Sipan. In many ways those days were idyllic: hours of exploration in the local markets where the smell of pungent herbs and spices tickled the nose; splendid meals of fresh local fish, tomatoes and avocados served at big tables set up under bougainvillea-laden bowers; much laughter and great conversation with a wonderful group of funny, intelligent and committed people who were excavating in the area; a visit to an archaeological site being excavated by Chris Donnan, a leading expert in the field; the opportunity to see and touch some exquisite Moche ceramics just recently unearthed.

But I was also aware that these were troubled times in Moche country. El Nino was on its way. It was already raining in Chile; fish stocks in the normally teeming waters off the coast were down by eighty per cent, and fishermen were coming ashore to try to make ends meet; the normally fertile lands in the mountains were now locked in drought, and the people from the highlands were migrating to lower ground in search of arable land. All were converging on the narrow strip of desert between the mountains and the sea. Invasores, invaders, the locals called them, and the potential for confrontation was mounting. Some of the invasores were armed, according to the gossip in the markets.

Suddenly normally friendly people were viewing visitors with what I would call benign hostility. Nothing serious: just an empty pop can kicked in your general direction, but never right at you, or rather avid fly swatting as you walked by, events that created in you a kind of rigid anxiety when you found yourself stranded on a lonely road, lest the next person to happen along be unfriendly. I realized that I was seeing first hand the kind of social unrest great environmental swings can bring.

The penny finally dropped for me when I visited an archaeological excavation at San Jose de Moro. The archaeologists were excavating at the foot of a huaca just a few yards off the Panamericana. As the director, Dr. Andrew Nelson of the University of Western Ontario, showed me the work that had been done, the ancient Moche suddenly came into focus for me. For the story told by the layers of earth through which the archaeologists had cut showed decades of climatic disaster -- searing drought, followed by flooding of immense consequence, successive El Ninos if you will, over and over again.

Suddenly I saw the Moche in a much more sympathetic light, as a society that could not help but see itself at the mercy of strange forces over which it had no control. Their brilliant engineers built sophisticated irrigation systems to bring water from the mountains to make their desert kingdom bloom. Then an earthquake destroyed them, or moved the water courses just enough that they didn't work anymore. Their citizens worked hard to grow enough food for the population, to build great ceremonial centers and cities around them, and the rivers and water courses dried up. Then after years of blistering drought, the rains came with a vengeance, with flash floods that melted their huacas, stripped away crops, livestock, homes and even loved ones.

And the Moche did what so many societies across the ages have done. They developed rituals that, if performed absolutely rigorously, absolutely correctly, would somehow protect them from these forces. If just the right number of prisoners was taken, sacrificed with the proper ceremony, the right incantations recited in the great plazas, then they would be saved. If the blood was spilled perfectly, then drunk by their leader, the Warrior Priest, at just the right time, and in just the right way, then the rains would stop, or start, or the earthquake would not happen.

It didn't work, of course. While the reason for the collapse of the Moche empire is the subject of some debate, sometime in the eighth century, the empire disintegrated. Perhaps the huge geological and climatic swings proved too much for even as sophisticated a culture as the Moche undoubtedly were. Whatever the reason, they were gone, replaced by later civilizations, and for a very long time, virtually forgotten.

My journey ended at Sipan. At the site there is a small museum, and then the huaca in which the royal tombs were found. It is rather unprepossessing in a way, considering the importance of the discovery. A few men hang around the entranceway hawking the usual tourist junk, including the odd fake antiquity. A couple of woman staff a stand selling soft drinks and the ubiquitous tee-shirt.

One enters the site to see work still being carried on, and makes one's way to an upper level, to suddenly find oneself looking down several feet into a replica of the tomb, as it was found in 1987. In the center of it all lies a skeleton richly ornamented, with gold eyes, and nose ornament, gold headdress, gold and silver scepter, gold bells, gold and silver sandals. The gold is always on his right, silver on the left, sun, moon duality perhaps. Shells are everywhere, in beaded pectorals, and scattered about the tomb. Placed in several locations around the tomb are tiny ceramic pots in human form called cresoles, and caches of stirrup handled pots. Buried with him are his dog and six other people, three of them women, one child, at the sides, head and foot of his coffin. It is the Warrior Priest, the one who tried to protect the society, buried with great ceremony and wealth, but also a respect befitting the crucial role I thought he played in the Moche world.

Were the Moche that different from us, I wondered. Do we not share their anxiety about forces over which we feel we have no control? Drug-resistant bacteria; modern-day plagues, even Y2K and the advent of the new millennium? Maybe not.

And so I wrote my mystery set in northern Peru. I called it The Moche Warrior: An archaeological mystery. Just recently I placed it on my book shelf beside the other two books in the series, The Xibalba Murders and The Maltese Goddess. It is fiction: my sleuth, antiques shop owner Lara McClintoch, becomes an unwitting link in a chain of smugglers of Moche artifacts. It is set in the context of a society in upheaval, at the time of the millennium, around about now. Like most mystery fiction, it ends optimistically. I like to think people will find it an enjoyable read, won't guess the identity of the murderer before the end, and learn something at the same time, including an appreciation for ancient civilizations and a respect for the past.

While I was writing it, the rains began in Peru. The places I had visited were submerged under a new three hundred kilometer lake. The area was ordered evacuated. Fleeing cars had to be pulled across bridges over swollen river beds with chains. Something like thirty men died, I'm told, trying to dig a trench to divert dangerously high waters.

History does, of course, repeat itself. Perhaps we didn't say our prayers just right.