The sea eagle gyres by the cliff. The waves crash on the boulders below the cave. The Maelstrom spins and unspins. The hands of the dead press through the stone from the other side, meeting those of the living palm to palm, finger to finger . . . Time proceeds according to its usual rhythms beyond the threshold, but not here in this thin place.
~
‘Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away,’ wrote John Berger, ‘the talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.’
In December 1994 three French cavers, led by Jean-Marie Chauvet, were exploring the Ardèche gorges close to the great meander of the Cirque d’Estre. Using smoke from a mosquito coil, they detected air moving from a boulder-choked limestone fissure high on a valley side. They cleared the boulders and dug out what revealed itself as the entrance to a downwards-sloping tunnel, just wide enough for the thinnest of the cavers – a young woman called Eliette Brunel – to crawl down. Using a chisel and hammer, Brunel was able to clear the tunnel of its stone snags such that her larger companions could follow her. After thirty angled feet the tunnel dropped near-vertically towards what seemed to be a large chamber. They descended this chute and were excited to find themselves in a substantial space, later measured at around 1,300 feet in length and up to 165 feet wide. In places stalactites stood like pillars, fusing floor to ceiling. The three advanced further, sweeping their torch-beams around in wonder. It was every caver’s dream: to be the first to discover a chamber of such dimensions, and to explore the systems with which it was connected.
Then Eliette cried out and all three of them stopped, astonished. Her torchlight ‘flashed onto a mammoth’, she recalled later: ‘then a bear, then a lion with a semicircle of dots which seemed to emerge from its muzzle like drops of blood . . . We saw human hands, both positive and negative impressions. And a frieze of other animals thirty feet long.’ Giant stags with fabulously tined antlers roamed the walls of the chamber, rhinoceroses fought with locked horns, a single owl perched on a rim of stone. Some of the images were incised, others depicted in red and black pigments. On a high-standing slab of rock sat the skull of a bear.
The trio had entered what would become known as Chauvet Cave, also nicknamed ‘the Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, and it contained the greatest gallery of prehistoric art ever discovered. An uncanny sense of immediacy haunted the space at the time of that first modern entry. Some of the paint palettes used to make the work more than 30,000 years previously were still on the cave floor, abandoned beneath the paintings they had helped create. The tapers used to light the chamber had been dropped where they were held, their black ash spilling across the limestone. Many of the walls had been scraped clean before the paint was applied or the incisions made, to increase the contrast between mark and medium.
The art of the chamber has an astonishing liveliness to it. Despite the rudimentary materials and the lack – to our knowledge – of any kind of training or tradition on which the artists could draw, the animals of Chauvet seem ready to step from the stone that holds them. The horns and cloven hoofs of the bison are painted twice, the lines running close to one another, to give the impression of movement – a shake of the head, a stamp of the foot. The horses are painted with soft muzzles and lips, which one wishes to reach out and touch, feel, feed. Sixteen lions – muscles tensed, eyes fixed with hunting alertness on their quarry – pursue a herd of bison from right to left across a wall of stone. This is, you realize, an early version of stop-motion; a proto-cinema. Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away . . .
Throughout the cave there is, strikingly, little foreground present – no line of landscape or vegetation on which these creatures exist. They have no habitat save the rock and the dark, and as such they seem to float free, unmoored from the world. They exist at once as exquisite anatomical drawings – and as embodiments of a worldview utterly different from our own. These animals live, as Simon McBurney memorably puts it:
in an enormous present, which also contained past and future. A present in which nature was not only contiguous with them, but continuous. They flowed in and out of a continuum of everything around them; just as the animals flow into and out of the rock. And if the rock was alive, so were the animals. Everything was alive.
Perhaps, concludes McBurney, ‘this is what truly separates us’ from the makers of this art: ‘not the space of time but the sense of time . . . In our minute splicing of our lives into milliseconds, we live separated from everything that surrounds us.’ Certainly, the three discoverers of the cave recognized, as they stood there that first day in 1994, something of that older sense of being. ‘It was as if time had been abolished,’ wrote Jean-Marie Chauvet, ‘as if the tens of thousands of years of separation no longer existed, and we were not alone, the painters were here too.’
The modern history of cave art is scored by such shooting-star moments of discovery, of which Chauvet is only the most luminous. The stories of another of the great unearthings vary, but one version runs as follows. In September 1940, four months after the German invasion of France, a teenager called Marcel Ravidat, out with his dog in the woods near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne, discovered a fissure in the limestone near an uprooted tree that was wide enough to squeeze through. Enticed by a local rumour of a secret hiding place containing buried treasure, Ravidat returned with three friends, and together the four young men eased into the opening, and then followed a long passage on and down into a chamber deep inside the rock. The chamber did indeed hold treasure – but not of the kind they had anticipated. For the walls of this rotunda-like space were, like those of Chauvet, covered with paintings: a miraculous bestiary of animals that, in the dim light, seemed to be moving. A frieze of thirty-six animals circled the gallery, comprising six stags, a bear, eleven aurochs, seventeen horses and a fantastical creature resembling a unicorn. More galleries led off the rotunda, and their walls also held spectacular paintings, created more than 15,000 years earlier: hundreds of horses with bristling manes, a stag with curlicued antlers, throwing its head up and rolling its eyes back as it bellows, aurochs, oxen, cats, bears, and a human with a bird’s head facing a bison, bending its own neck in defiance to show its horns.
Five years after the finding of Lascaux, other people were discovering other chambers of darkness elsewhere in Europe. On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops pushing west through Poland entered the death camp of Auschwitz eleven days after the Germans had evacuated it, driving the survivors of the camp on a brutal westwards march that would kill more than 15,000 of them. In the haste to abandon the camp the Germans did not have time to destroy its infrastructure. The Soviets found the dark interiors of the gas chambers, the bodies of the dead and the dying, and the after-effects of mass killing on an unthinkable scale: hundreds of thousands of folded men’s suits and women’s dresses; mounds of dentures and eyeglasses; tons of shorn female hair. Through the months ahead, Soviet and Allied troops would reach and enter dozens of labour and death camps, encountering in those places evidence of the worst crimes of which humanity had ever shown itself capable. Many of the men who ‘liberated’ the camps and the gas chambers were never able to describe what they had seen there. In this way, the generous secrets of Lascaux – as Kathryn Yusoff writes in a brilliant essay on these doubled discoveries – ‘became known just as everything visible on the surface was in darkness, illuminated only by the exploding field of destruction. In this ruptured landscape, a gift of such wealth arrive[d] to suggest the potential of the universe to be otherwise.’
The philosopher Georges Bataille visited the cave at Lascaux in 1955, fifteen years after its discovery, at the point when the nuclear arms race was entering rapid escalation, and atomic testing was being pioneered in underground chambers and desert spaces. A new order of destruction was declaring its possibilities: the annihilation of a species, of a planet.
‘I am simply struck,’ wrote Bataille after surfacing from Lascaux, ‘by the fact that light is being shed on our
birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us.’
~
I stop on the threshold of the cave, stepping out of rock and into air. The rain is heavier now. The landscape comes back to itself: first brightness, then colour. Surge of water, echo of wave in the cave-space behind me. I pick my way back along the bay-line, towards the remains of the settlement.
I have a strong, strange sense of being watched.
Gulls watch me from shit-stained rocks in the bay.
What did I see in the dark? A shadow-play of pasts, events refusing sequence, the fingertip drawing its lines through time far from the well-lit world, there in the unfathomable cave. This was a place that absorbed those visitors who crossed its threshold – as it had absorbed me, another in the long history of meaning-seekers and meaning-makers in its shadows.
A sea eagle watches me from the burly air above Hellsegge.
I think of the other dark spaces I have entered in the underland. I do not know yet that I will enter one more, 400 miles south-east of here, that is perhaps the darkest of them all.
Oystercatchers watch me from the sand of the bay.
Wave-water moves between big shore boulders, surging up around my feet as if upwelling from within the earth, and there rises in me a longing to hold again those people I have loved who are dead.
Otters watch me from among the mossed stones of Refsvika.
I look across the bay to the northern shore and there, there, by the glimmering birches is a figure standing dark on rising ground, where no figure should be. The figure is in silhouette and does not move; it is human-like and it is facing me.
The figure watches me from the birches.
Then two oystercatchers flicker across the water between us with high cries of alarm, catching my eye – and when I look back across the bay there is nothing on the rising ground, no one there at all.
~
Early evening on my last night in the bay, and the wind falls almost to nothing. After the days of gale, the silence is astonishing. Freed from the wind’s rushing, all other sounds are crisper. I sit on a flat stone near my tent.
The tops of the peaks are clear, and show their snow. The sky above them is streaked in blue and the sun glows through a haze out to sea. A windless half hour. Waves still boom out on the reefs. A calm starts to rise in me.
Then I hear a noise. It resembles a jet engine starting up. A grainy roar, building steadily in volume. I cannot place it. It worries me. The air temperature begins to drop. I see that plumes of cloud from the top of the peaks above the cave are now not streaming eastwards towards Hellsegge. They have swung southwards, are streaming inland, and they are longer. The wind is blowing again, but now from the true north. It is strong and cold, and growing stronger and colder. I understand that the roaring noise is the sound this new northerly makes as it rushes over the granite summits. The sea is already starting to chop and brawl, and it has changed in colour from grey-green to grey-black. My tent shifts and tugs on its weak moorings.
A wall of white sweeps towards me, and hailstones the size of peppercorns hiss into the lichen around me. Then small flakes of snow, then spikes of sleet.
That night there is no hope of sleep. The northerly builds and howls, and so do my worries. How will I get out of this locked-in space, this trap of a bay? The surf on the reefs sounds like bomb-blasts, detonating every few seconds.
At midnight a gust of blizzard punches the tent flat and rips all but two of its pegs free. I have no choice but to fight my way out of the collapsed tent, and then carry it whole into a soaked dip in the land, weight the corners down with rocks, and crawl back into what shelter is left.
Half-light comes at four in the morning. I am too cold to stay still any longer, hunched in the sodden canvas. I walk to a high point from where I can see the sea through the ongoing blizzard. It is a shocking sight. A hell has broken loose beyond the encircling walls of the bay. Big grey waves mosh and smash. Spray shoots fifty or sixty feet into the air where surf strikes the reefs.
Sleet blacks the sky to the north. A guillemot whirrs just above wave level, at home in this storm. Then there – there, can it be? – I see, out in the direction of the Maelstrom, a thin wire of light, running below the blizzard. It is a gleam of bronze, and it suggests that somewhere out beyond the storm, sun is falling on water, and this in turn tells me that the storm will end before too long – and this means that I may have the weather window I need to leave the cave and what it holds.
For a long time after those days at the cave of the red dancers, I find myself unable to shake the sense that I have left one of my selves back in the bay – left a figure on the shore. This feeling is powerfully with me as I travel still further north up the Norwegian coast from the Lofotens, to the big Arctic island of Andøya in the Vesterålen archipelago, where a battle over the sea’s underland is under way.
9
The Edge
(Andøya, Norway)
‘I have four pets,’ Bjørnar Nicolaisen tells me at 69.31°N, ‘two cats and two sea eagles. I feed them all together on the shore, there by the throne, with the best fish in the world!’
He gives a huge laugh, and points east through the window of his living room: snow-filled fields sloping away to a rocky beach that borders a fjord several miles in width. Steel-blue water in the fjord, choppy where the currents are running. Far across the fjord, ranks of smooth-snowed peaks gleam in the late sunlight. They are shaped more wildly than any mountains I have ever seen before. Witches’ hats and shark fins and jabbing fingers, all polished white as porcelain. I cannot see a throne on the shore, though.
‘Here, try these.’ He hands me a pair of binoculars. Black leather-clad barrels, weathered in places to brown. Polished eye-pieces – and a Nazi eagle engraved into the left-hand barrel-back.
‘Wehrmacht-issue,’ says Bjørnar. ‘Beautiful lenses. An officer’s. When my father was dying, he asked me what I wanted from his possessions. “One thing only,” I told him, “the binoculars you took from the Germans.”‘
I lift the binoculars and the shoreline leaps to my eyes, close enough to touch. Calibrated cross-hairs float in my vision. I pan right along the beach. Nothing. I switch back left. Yes, there, a chair of some kind – but six or seven feet tall, built from driftwood lashed and nailed together. It looks like something the ironborn of Westeros might have made.
‘I take the eagles a cod or a saithe whenever I come back from a good day’s fishing. I feed them by my chair, there.’
‘Bjørnar, you are the only person I know who counts sea eagles among his pets.’
‘I am more of a cat person,’ Bjørnar replies.
‘Than a dog person or than an eagle person?’
‘Than a people person!’
Bjørnar laughs and laughs – a deep, explosive laugh coming from far inside his chest.
~
The blizzards of Lofoten lighten and then clear as I travel north to Andøya. My first day ends in a cloudless dusk at Andenes, the town at the island’s northernmost tip. Andenes is a town of wide streets, hard winters and night-sailings. The chimneys wear chrome caps. A magpie chatters on a street light. There is a violet haze to the air, and a burning cold. Peaks carry fine ridges of snow. The sea opens away from the town. North from here is 100 miles of ocean and then the Svalbard archipelago.
The sunset is opulent, all purple and orange satins behind the peak line. Later a white moon hangs over the ocean.
The next morning I go to see Bjørnar and Ingrid. Their house is a few miles south of Andenes. It is set back from the road and faces east towards the sea channel that separates the island from the Norwegian mainland. Cross-country skis and poles are leaned up against the garage.
I ring the bell, the door is flung open and there is Bjørnar, roaring a welcome, putting out one great hand to grasp mine, and at the same time clapping his other to my forearm and seizing it tightly.
I am straight away in the grip of Bjørnar Nicolaisen, and
I will not leave it for many days to come.
‘Come in, come in!’
Black leather flat cap, a short white beard, a grey woollen fisherman’s jumper. Sixty years old, I guess, or fifty, or seventy. Massive arms and chest. Wide-set legs. A vast smile, an even bigger laugh – and the strangest eyes I have ever seen.
Bjørnar’s pupils are white-blue, so pale it seems he must be blind. They are the eyes of a seer, unsettlingly steady. He holds me still for a moment, looks me up and down, and I feel those eyes see into and through me.
Then: ‘This is Ingrid!’
Ingrid is wearing red fluffy Liverpool Football Club slippers and she is carrying a baby. She smiles the kindest of smiles, and motions an apology that she cannot shake my hand.
‘This is our granddaughter, Sigrid,’ says Ingrid. ‘Coffee is in the flask. Come, sit, be comfortable.’
A cat with tortoiseshell fur and lizard eyes yawns on the carpet of the living room. Instead of a row of flying ducks on the wall, there is a row of four brass sea eagles ascending the wallpaper in orderly flight and decreasing size. Two polar bears are tooled into the iron doors of a wood-burning stove. On decking outside the window, headless cod dry in racks, swaying in the slight breeze like wind-chimes.
Bjørnar is a fisherman, a fighter, and he understands the underland of the sea, and for these reasons I have come to meet him. In the winters Bjørnar fishes long days, from five in the morning until seven or eight at night. Winter is cod season, and it is just ending as I reach Andøya. When the cod are running he goes out in the dark of these high latitudes, comes back in the dark, and it is dark during most of the time that he is at sea, save a few hours’ light around noon.
Bjørnar fishes alone. There is no one to see if he goes overboard or the boat is swamped. The temperatures he works in can be as low as -15°C for a fifteen-hour working day. But the cod are the prize for the risks and hardship – and such a prize. The finest fish from the best cod waters in the world; cod up to seventy kilograms in weight. Kaffetorsk – ‘coffee-cod’ – as the biggest fish are nicknamed.
Underland Page 24