The Caves of Périgord (29 page)

He unlocked an iron door and led them into a dark tunnel, lit only by a dim blue light, which gave way to a chamber with smoothed walls, and then a flight of steps downward. It smelled quite dry, and not in the least musty. He opened another door, and guided them into pitch darkness. Lydia, recalling her visit to the copy of the cave and telling herself to expect a rather less impressive sight of slightly faded paintings, despite the undeniable thrill of the original, braced herself for a mild disappointment.

Then the director threw a switch, and a long, deep chamber, perhaps fifty yards long and ten yards wide, flooded with a cold, bright halogen light. Lydia heard the others gasp, and Manners cry out and protectively clutch her arm, as a great herd seemed almost to leap upon them.

Bulls, she thought. Giants from another age. The great bulls of Lascaux, on each side of her, rising. No, towering into the ceiling, and given depth and mass by the other beasts around them. She saw horses and great deer with monstrous antlers, and then what seemed almost a unicorn. My God, she thought, all sense of fear gone, her instant reaction of alarm replaced by a sense of enchanted wonder, the bulls are dancing.

Manners released her arm and stepped two paces forward, and began to spin slowly, taking in the great painted arc of roof above their heads, the beasts before them and behind, spinning and moving as if he were dancing too. His arms stretched out dreamily, his trunk swayed, his glowing face seemed at sublime peace. And realizing that she had suppressed this thought too long, Lydia knew that she wanted to bed this man.

She sensed her own feet follow unbidden, unable to stay still, unable to focus upon any one image as the animals seemed to swirl and lumber around her. She heard Manners laugh with pure joy, and her own delight surged too. She could not be silent and laughed exultantly in turn as she stepped forward. Manners, his face beaming at her, took her hand, raised it high, and twirled her as if on a dance floor. She heard Clothilde join the laughter, and Malrand start to clap his hands together, half-mockery, half-salute.

And then the darkness fell once more as the director turned off the lamps. An utter blackness, freezing her, chilling her, holding her in place as the sense of the still-looming bulls began to invade her joy. A spark, as rude as lightning, and then a tiny glow, like a feeble candle, was in the director’s hand. He moved forward, taking the dim light to a
great black bull with a speckled face, two horses seeming to race beneath it, and another red horse with a black mane running at its shoulder.

“This is one of the lamps they used,” came the director’s voice, soft and low, almost sepulchral. “It is made of stone, a small bowl hollowed out to hold tallow and a juniper wick. It reaches but one image at a time, one beast at a time, each taking its place in this pantheon of prehistory.”

A complete silence fell as they all stood immobile in place, Lydia and Manners still joined by their raised hands, frozen in minuet. The director flicked on a small but very powerful torch, and played it deliberately from beast to beast, picking out faces that became distinct personalities. A big black bull to the right, its horns raised as if in challenge. Two to her left seemed to face each other almost genially, one almost jaunty with the cock of its forward legs, the other placidly bovine, looking almost surprised.

“When I first saw it by the light of a small electric torch, I thought they would devour me,” said Malrand. “Then I looked at their faces, and they seemed almost friendly.”

“When I first saw this, I wanted to dance too, dance and sing,” Clothilde said. “This is a joyous place, solemn but filled with delights. The whiteness of the chalk makes it so light, even with a feeble candle. Even in total darkness, you know that it but waits for the smallest glow of light. This is how churches should be. If they were, perhaps I might attend them.”

“Perhaps that is why Abbé Breuil called it the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric man,” said Malrand. “Their God might not have borne much resemblance to our own, but their sense of worship seems very close to us. A little happier, perhaps, more at ease with the life around them. I think I understand your teacher, Clothilde, your Leroi-Gourhan, who felt it was all a balance between the male and female principle. This is a sensual place. There is sexuality here.”

“There is movement, too, Monsieur le Président,” said the director, shifting his torch to the right. “See the great black bull. Is he guarding or is he challenging, about to charge? But look where he points.” The torch flicked to an opening at the end of the cave, an opening half-blocked by more paintings. He led them toward it.

“This great room is the Hall of the Bulls. Now we are entering the Axial Gallery. There is a turn to the right and a descent. Wait while I turn on the light.” The director brushed past them, heading for the passage. As he passed, he handed the small stone lamp to Lydia. “You see the grooves and patterns scored into the handle of the lamp, mademoiselle? There are many such signs cut into the rock here. They may have been a kind of signature of individual artists, saying this is my lamp, this is my stretch of wall. We don’t know.”

He turned on the halogen lamps again, and behind them the whole chamber exploded into view once more, a great tumble of life.

“I made an official visit to Africa,” said Malrand. “They took me to one of the game reserves at dawn, to a guest house in the trees that overlooked a water hole. It was like this, all animals jostling together. Perhaps that is how it was then, a great tumult of life.”

“I spent months as a student pursuing a theory I had,” said Clothilde. “I had been struck by the way this chamber reminded me of those maps the ancient Greeks made of the night sky, tracing the shapes of hunters and bears and beasts from star to star. I tried to make the beasts of the chamber fit the various models of the night sky over Péri gord seventeen thousand years ago. Each time I seemed to be on the brink of success in one section, another frustrated me. But I still have that feeling of being beneath a vast vault of stars.”

“A tumult of life, you said, Monsieur le Président—but also of death,” intoned the director. “Look here, where we turn into the Axial Gallery—the falling horse. We are sure that it is falling, rather than simply being painted at this angle, when we look at the ears, the way they suggest the horse is tumbling backward. Perhaps this represents one of
the ways they hunted, driving beasts over a cliff to fall to their deaths. And then here there is battle. See these two ibex, poised to hurl their horns against each other.”

“What is that grid sign between them? asked Lydia. “Almost like a window with bars.”

“Who knows, mademoiselle? There is much here we cannot comprehend. Perhaps the mark of an artist, perhaps some hieroglyph that had meaning to them, if not to us. Perhaps the indication of some kind of fence. They may not have domesticated their animals, as farming communities were to do ten thousand and more years in the future. But they may have used some kind of fence in their hunts.”

One red beast, with a black face and neck that seemed slightly too small and even delicate for its bulk, caught Lydia’s attention. Bull or cow? She could not tell. It carried light and slender horns, sinuous yet lethal as rapiers, and its expression looked for a moment mean and angry, and then just bewildered.

“This beast is extraordinary. It has character and expression—almost like a portrait,” she exclaimed.

“I am so glad you said that,” said Clothilde. “That is my theory, that these were not just generic animals, a standard bull or horse, but individual representations. I have this wild hope—that hardly anyone shares—that one day we might find a portrait of a person. There are some rough caricatures of human faces that have been found at La Marche, but I have this feeling that artists such as these not only could have produced recognizable human faces, but would almost have been impelled to do so.”

“Madame is known for the daring of her imagination,” said the director.

“I’m full of wild theories, you mean,” laughed Clothilde.

“Your President respects your intuition, and shares your hopes,” said Malrand.

“Then my President will want to find the money to finance my research project to discover new caves,” retorted Clothilde. “With echo
sounders and access to satellite mapping and help from the Air Force, we could identify caves all across this region. There may be more caves like Lascaux, perhaps even finer. Perhaps we could find portraits of the first French people. The Ministry of Culture supports it, but the project always dies in the Council of Ministers. If you were to adopt it as the
Projet Malrand
…

“No politics, please, madame. I am taking a day off from affairs of state and budget battles,” said Malrand lightly.

“But you are the only man in power who loves this art as I do, the only man who could make the difference,” she protested.

“Madame, enough,” he snapped, in a tone so harsh and abrupt that Clothilde bowed her head and Lydia and Manners stared at the suddenly furious President. “I am not here to be badgered. You tried in the car and now you try again here. Just leave me in peace, if you please.”

“These horses,” Lydia exclaimed, by trying to smooth over the sudden row. “They look like the horses of ancient Chinese pottery, the same coloring and proportions.”

“We call them the Chinese horses,” said the director quickly, desperate to have his moment with the President unspoiled. “The parallels are striking—and horses are by far the most common animals here, four times more common than the cattle or the deer. But from the bones we found, they did not eat them. Reindeer was their main diet, and yet reindeer are very rare in the cave—there is only one, among some six hundred paintings and fifteen hundred engravings. And it is not even clear that it is meant to be a reindeer. That is why we doubt that there was a hunting ritual here, picturing the beasts they intended to hunt. Some scholars think that this painting was a work of the winter, when there was little else to do in the long nights. But they did not live in the caves, and from the tent sites we have found, there are signs that they were migrants, traveling with the reindeer herds. Allowing for the lack of domesticated animals and agriculture, they lived a little like the Evenk tribes of Siberia, a little like the Indians of North America.”

“Perhaps we should move on to the Nave,” said the director. “Back down this Axial Gallery, and through the narrow passage to your left. You now will see treasures that are unique. These parts of the cave have not been copied for the tourist exhibit. These can be seen only here, in the place where they were made. You will see on the ceiling above a mass of horses engraved into the rock. And now farther, into what we call the Nave. To your left, the famous panel of the black cow. And look beneath its rear feet, the checkerboards of black and red and yellow squares. Another mystery.”

Lydia could feel Clothilde fuming behind her, and reached back to squeeze her hand in solidarity. Dismayed that the joyful mood that gripped their small party in the Hall of the Bulls should now have become icy, she wondered why Malrand had reacted so furiously. He was probably sick and tired of people constantly asking him for favors. But there had been a distinctly personal note in his curt silencing of Clothilde, almost as if the two of them had been involved at some time in the past. Hmm, there was a thought. But surely a presidential mistress, even if the affair were long in the past, would know better than to appeal to him in public? No, Malrand said she had tried the same gambit in the car. Perhaps that was Clothilde’s point, to get some kind of public commitment.

“Behind us is my own favorite,” said Malrand, his voice normal, his mood apparently equable again. “Am I right, Monsieur le Directeur, that we now see the swimming stags?”

“Indeed so, Monsieur le Président. A great work, its scale matched by its ambition.” The five stags’ heads stretched almost the full remaining length of the cavern, twelve or fifteen feet. Their antlers were far less ornate than those in the Hall of the Bulls, but somehow more real, emerging from a darker outcropping of rock that seemed to represent a river. Each stag’s head was cocked at a different angle, giving movement and continuity almost like a strip cartoon.

“How far does this cavern stretch back?” asked Manners.

“The Nave behind you goes on, ever narrower, and then dropping sharply, for some fifty meters, into a small chamber we call the Hall of the Cats, but they are very hard to see and it is not easy to reach. Down this way, we drop into what we call the pits, and then down a steep drop of stones into a kind of well, probably scooped out by swirling waters from the times when this was the course of an underground stream. It goes on another twenty meters or so, through a gap too narrow for anyone but a devoted cave explorer. But if we are careful here as we descend, we come to something quite unique.”

He played his light into a small gallery, picking out to their right the unfinished drawing of a horse; he swiveled the torch to the left, to the outline of a beast like a rhinoceros. Then he brought the light back toward them, and Manners reacted as if he had been punched.

“My God, it’s a killing!”

“More than that, a combat,” said Malrand. “Which leaves both participants dead.”

A crude drawing of a man, almost a stick figure, lay on the ground, arms outstretched. His head had either been very crudely drawn, or had been given a long, birdlike beak. His penis was erect, and in the shape of a spike. Below him lay a stick with a bird perched on one end. Towering over the fallen men was a great bison, some four feet long, its horns aiming down to gore at its victim. But a stick, perhaps a spear, was in the doomed beast’s belly, and its entrails spilled in great loops on the ground.

“There are many theories about this, but only some elements I think we can be sure of,” said the director. “That stick with the bird on top seems to me to be a decoy. A hunter could lie in wait in a pit with that stick poking above it. I have seen some local people hunt small birds this way. Possibly the fallen man is wearing a bird mask for the same reason. Some people call him the shaman, or magician, since we know that bird and animal masks are worn during rituals by the shamans of many Native American and Siberian tribes. And then there is another
stick on the ground, with a diagonal line running from it. I think that is a spear thrower, a stick onto which a spear was placed, and which greatly increased the force and range of the spear’s flight. Beyond that, I cannot usefully speculate.”