‘Christ, Luc, I’m not an idiot.’
Luc playfully swatted him. ‘I thought we already established you were. Let’s go.’
It didn’t take long to prove incontrovertibly, that this was the cave of the manuscript. They quickly found three distinctive paintings – a horse, a stag and a stippled bull – that were identical in every respect to Barthomieu’s illustrations.
Luc trod delicately towards the interior of the cave, training his beam on the guano-encrusted floor before taking each successive step, making sure he wasn’t crushing something precious under his boot. Above their heads, bats were squealing incessantly in ear-splitting, high-pitched urgency. The atmosphere was noxious, not intolerable but undeniably unpleasant. Hugo took his handkerchief and pressed it over his mouth and nose to shield himself from the caustic ammonia sting of the bat urine.
‘Is this going to kill me?’ Hugo complained, shivering in the cool dampness.
Luc was uninterested in any distraction and only said, ‘The handkerchief’s a good idea.’
Every couple of paces Luc removed the lens cap from his Leica and flashed a series of shots, checking the images on the LCD screen to assure himself he wasn’t imagining the whole thing.
‘Look at the quality of these horses, Hugo! The understanding of anatomy. The capture of motion. This is highly sophisticated. See the crossed legs on this one? That’s a full realization of perspective. It exceeds the artistry at Lascaux. It’s absolutely incredible. And these lions! Look at the patience and wisdom on their faces.’
The ammonia must have served as smelling salts. Hugo was now completely sober and he asked seriously, like a student, ‘How old do you think these are?’
‘Hard to know. Lascaux was painted about eighteen thousand years ago. This seems more advanced. There’s a full palette of pigments in use here too: charcoal, graphite, clays, red and yellow iron oxide, manganese, so if I had to guess, I’d say it’s more recent.’
The end of the first chamber seemed to be demarcated by a fanciful painting of a mammoth with a trunk so gigantic it reached below its legs. Beyond that, they came to a narrower, uphill part of the cave, not so strictured they had to crawl, but a fairly tight squeeze. There was a single adornment within this channel – at eye level a pair of human hands done in finger stencilling. In this instance, red ochre had been blown by mouth onto outstretched hands, leaving pale, almost flesh-coloured negatives on the rock.
‘The hands of the artist?’ Luc asked reverentially. He was about to explain the technique when he was distracted by something ahead illuminated by Hugo’s wandering torch. ‘Look, there! My God, look at that!’
The cave opened up into another bulbous chamber, larger than the one they had left.
They were standing in the middle of something quite wondrous.
There were dozens, literally dozens, of charging black and brown bison, each no more than a metre in length, their legs in motion, their manes and beards flowing, their eyes bright circles swimming in black chunky heads. The herd was immense and since it spanned the walls on both sides, it behaved like a stereoscopic gimmick, giving Luc and Hugo the impression they were running with the herd. It wasn’t an impossible stretch to hear the thunder, to experience the ground shaking between them and feel hot plumes of breath escaping from their bearded mouths.
‘This is completely unique, totally . . .’ Luc started to mumble and then he saw the human figure to his left, a sole hominid in a bovine sea.
Hugo saw it too and shouted through his handkerchief, ‘It’s our man!’
The primitive figure, which had been aptly reproduced in Barthomieu’s manuscript, stood with his birdlike head, spindly arms extending into four-fingered hands, long, simply rendered oblong body, stick legs with exaggerated canoe-shaped feet and that big, erect knife of a penis, pointing like a weapon at one of the charging bison. Above the heads of the beasts was a swarm of barbed spears zeroing in. One appeared to have found its mark. It was sticking into a bison’s belly, spilling concentric circles of disembowelment.
Luc quickly snapped a dozen pictures then let his camera swing back against his midsection. ‘One, solitary man against a herd. The world’s first hero, wouldn’t you say?’
‘He seems excited by his own work,’ Hugo joked.
‘It’s a sign of virility, not arousal,’ Luc said seriously, continuing forward.
‘Yes, professor,’ Hugo countered, ‘whatever you say.’
The cave seemed to be generally linear, a series of chambers burrowing into the cliff like plump segments of an insect. Each chamber contained further marvels, a prehistoric bestiary of succulently drawn game. Luc was lapping it all up, a cat at a trough of cream and eventually, it was up to Hugo to declare that surely it was dawn outside. And besides, he said, the ammonia had got to him. He had a headache and was fighting nausea.
Luc was reluctant to leave until he had completed at least a cursory examination of the entire complex, however daunting the task. There always seemed to be one more nook, one more chamber and gallery, each graced with creatures as fresh as the day they were painted. However, the deeper they got, the more they had to compete with bats, frantically unappreciative of the light.
Luc persuaded Hugo to bear with him a little longer, to explore one more chamber, one more gallery until they came to what appeared to be a dead end, a completely unpainted cul-de-sac, thick with bat droppings, almost choking them with stench. Luc was about to declare their night at an end and perhaps surrender to exhaustion and his own ammonia-sickness when his beam caught a small opening to his right, a hole through the wall that was just large enough to crawl through, if one had the temerity.
Luc removed his rucksack and left it behind. Hugo knew it was pointless to try to stop him. He refused to follow, though he had no desire to stay on his own because the ceiling was moving with roosting bats, stimulated by the intrusion and occasionally taking to flight. He could almost feel leathery wing tips brush his face and he struggled to control his breathing. He couldn’t bear training his light on the roiling mass overhead and he was equally unwilling to be in the dark so he shone his torch in the direction of the hole. The best he could do was plead with Luc to hurry up while he kept his face tightly covered by cloth. He shuddered when Luc’s soles disappeared into the blackness.
Luc gingerly crept through several metres of hard narrowness. He had the uncanny sensation of crawling through a birth canal.
Suddenly he was able to stand inside a small vault, the size of a modest sitting room. He shone his torch in sweeping arcs and blinked in awe at what he saw. While he was wetting his lips to call Hugo, he realised he was merely in an anteroom, of sorts. A larger chamber was just ahead, an igloo-shaped dome that literally left him gasping for air.
‘Hugo, you must come!’
In a minute, Hugo emerged on all fours to join him, grumbling and growling, but when he stood he let out an enthusiastic ‘Christ!’
The entire antechamber was festooned with hands stencilled in red ochre, 360 degrees of hand prints, lefts and rights, all the same size, giving the room the appearance of a planetarium with the hands as stars.
Luc beckoned him, ‘Come here!’
The walls of the final chamber were lavishly painted – that was hardly a surprise – but there were no animals. Not a single one.
Luc said, ‘I was wondering, what about those other pictures in Barthomieu’s book – what about the plants? Look!’
They were in a garden, a paradise. There were panels of green vines with stellate leaves, shrub-like plants with red berries, and on one wall a veritable sea of tall ochre and brown grasses, each stalk individually drawn, all of them bent in the same direction, as if a wind was bearing down. And standing in the middle of this savannah was a life-sized man rendered in black outline, a much-larger version of the bird man from the bison hunt, arms extended, hugely priapic, facing the direction of the unseen wind with his beak open. Calling, perhaps calling.
‘It’s our hero,’ Luc quietly said, fumbling with his lens cap.
There was no question the time had come to leave. There was nothing left to explore and Luc and Hugo were physically and mentally spent, both suffering from overexposure to the foul air. There were only so many ways that Luc could repeat that what they were experiencing was unprecedented. The animals were superbly naturalistic and in many ways unique for their quality and abundance but there was nothing remotely comparable to this depiction of flora in Paleolithic art.
After yet another expression of wonder from Luc, Hugo was getting impatient. ‘Yes, yes, so you’ve said, but we’ve really got to get out of here now. I can feel my life slipping away.’
Luc was staring eye-to-eye with the bird man, and wanted to speak out loud to him, but for Hugo’s sake, he played out the conversation in his head:
I’m coming back soon. You and I are going to get to know each other very well
.
He wasn’t sure what made him look down, but in the dimmest periphery of his torch light there was something he couldn’t ignore beside his left foot.
A small edge of black flint against the cave wall.
He knelt over it and swore. He had left his trowel in his rucksack, which was in the previous chamber.
He had a Bic pen in his breast pocket, removed its cap and started picking away at the earth and guano with the plastic prong.
‘I thought you said, touch nothing,’ Hugo complained.
‘Don’t worry. I’m an archaeologist,’ Luc replied. ‘This is important.’
In short order he had pecked away enough of the surrounding earth to expose a long slender blade of chipped flint, almost double the length of his index finger. It was leaning against the wall on its end, almost as if it had been purposefully balanced there. Luc lowered his head almost close enough to kiss it and blew the remaining dirt from its exposed surface, then excitedly he put his camera on macro mode and flashed away.
‘What’s the big deal?’ Hugo asked.
‘It’s Aurignacian!’
‘Oh yes?’ Hugo replied, unimpressed. ‘Can we please go now?’
‘No, listen. This central spine, here, this flaking pattern and this hourglass shape, this tool is definitely Aurignacian. It was made by the very first Homo sapiens in Europe. If, and I stress if, it’s contemporaneous with these paintings, this cave is about thirty thousand years old! That’s over ten thousand years older than Lascaux, and it’s more advanced than Lascaux in every artistic and technical criteria! I simply can’t understand this. I don’t know what to say.’
Hugo tugged him by the sleeve of his jacket. ‘You’ll think of something over breakfast. Now, for God’s sake, let’s go!’
The morning sun had turned the Vézère river into a sparkling ribbon. The air was fresh and birdsong rained down on them. It felt cleansing to breathe clean cool air.
Before they left the cave, Luc carefully rebuilt the dry wall, taking pains to conceal the entrance as effectively as the original wall builders, whoever they were, had done. He was bone-tired but giddy and a small voice inside his head warned him, that under these circumstances, they needed to be especially cautious along the ledge.
Nevertheless, they made steady progress retracing their route and it wasn’t too long before the old juniper tree came into view. Hugo needed to readjust his rucksack and the broad shelf under its rough, peeling trunk was a safe place to stop.
Luc dreamingly sipped what was left of his bottled water as he stared out across the river. Had the night really happened? Was he ready for the position he found himself in? Was he prepared to have his life irrevocably altered, to become a public person, the face of this mad discovery?
His reverie was interrupted by an almost trifling sound, a suggestion of rough scraping coming from the direction they had come. It was out of sight, behind bushes and jutting rock. He almost shrugged it off, but his senses were pricked enough that he couldn’t let it pass. He excused himself and backtracked several metres. As he was about to make his way around the jutting stones he thought he heard another faint scrape, but when he got a clear view of the ledge they had just traversed, there was nothing there.
He stood for a short while, trying to decide whether to backtrack further. There was something about that scraping that unsettled him; he felt a current of concern – or was it fear? – trickle through his body. But then Hugo called, loudly declaring he was ready to move, and the feeling passed. He quickly rejoined him under the juniper and said nothing of it.
It was late morning when they wearily arrived at the Land Rover, and true to his word, despite the phantasms of the night, Luc had insisted they stop and pick up the litter.
He saw the damage first and swore loudly, ‘Shit, Hugo, would you look at that!’
The driver’s side window was smashed and rounded pellets of safety glass filled the seat. And the cardboard University of Bordeaux sign was torn in half and tucked under the wiper blades as a clear taunt.
‘Friendly locals,’ Hugo sneered. ‘Shall we return the beer cans to their rightful place?’
‘I’m not going to let this spoil my mood,’ Luc insisted, through gritted teeth. He began sweeping up the glass with the torn pieces of cardboard. ‘Nothing’s going to spoil my mood.’
Before putting the car in gear, he rummaged through the glove box and started swearing.
‘I thought nothing was going to spoil your mood,’ Hugo said.
‘My registration’s gone. Why the hell would someone steal my logbook?’ He snapped the cover closed and drove off muttering.
In the centre of Ruac, they stopped at the small café, nameless, just a sign: C
AFÉ,
T
ABAC.
When Hugo attempted to lock the car, Luc pointed to the smashed window and ridiculed him, but before they went inside he cautioned, ‘Be careful what you say. We have a big secret to protect.’