Originally this passage was only three to five feet high. During their first visit, Marsal and Ravidat crawled along it on their hands and knees, just as the prehistoric people did. The floor also used to slope dramatically to the right. The painters must have sat on the floor, perhaps cushioned by sacks of grass, as they worked.
Many other caves have low, narrow tunnels whose walls are covered with engravings. The artists made drawings, signs, lines, and scratches one on top of the other. The result is a confusion of lines that can take hours and hours of careful tracing to decipher, if it can be deciphered at all. Many of the engravings in Lascaux and in other caves are as beautiful and technically accomplished as the best paintings, but many are not, and instead appear to be the work of unpracticed, untalented people who weren't artists at all. Presumably the paintings in the Hall of Bulls and the Axial Gallery were planned and executed by great artists to be part of some public occasion, although the audience in the Hall of Bulls could have been much larger than the one in the Axial Gallery. But the engravings in the Lateral Passage and in other narrow tunnels in other caves don't appear to be part of any grand design. They were private scratchings that were apparently part of a personal rite that individuals came here to perform.
After World War II someone made the boneheaded decision to lower the floor of the Lateral Passage to make it easier for tourists to see. Soil—tons of it—was dug up, put into wheelbarrows, and rolled outside, where it was dumped on the ground without any effort to sift it for archaeological remains. Who knows what was lost?
At the time of the discovery, the Lateral Passage led to a large mound of clay. To the left was a treacherous slope that slanted down to a tall, sloping gallery now called the Nave that is twenty yards long and over eighteen feet high in some places. The Nave contains paintings and engravings of fifty or so animals, as well as twenty-four signs. The art here is the equal of the finest art in the rest of the cave and includes compositions famous and impressive enough to be given names—the Great Black Cow, the Swimming Stags, and the Crossed Bison, which is the last painting, at the end of the gallery. It shows two bison back-to-back. Their rumps overlap and the intricate perspective of the two pairs of back legs is one of the great technical achievements of Paleolithic art. This mastery of perspective wasn't seen again in European art until Paolo Uccello in the fifteenth century. And the bison were drawn freehand. Most Paleolithic paintings began with an outline, often engraved. The Great Black Cow in this same gallery, for example, has an engraved outline. There are many places along the neck and back where the first line wasn't satisfactory and the artist engraved a second or even a third until it was right. But the Crossed Bison was painted directly with a brush without an outline or any false starts. Its perfection shows the assurance of a master.
The Nave contains a number of rectangular signs that are themselves divided into smaller rectangles. First the lines were deeply engraved; then each inner rectangle was painted a different color, making the whole composition look rather like a quilt. The colors are among the subtlest in cave art—hues of red, brown, yellow, and even purple. One such multicolored rectangle is beneath each of the hind legs of the Great Black Cow. Some scholars have proposed that these and similar rectangular signs represent traps—but if so, why the intricate coloring? And the Great Black Cow looks placid and unconcerned, which is not the attitude of an animal whose hind legs are ensnared.
At the end of the Nave is a narrow tunnel that is frequently filled with carbon dioxide that rises from inaccessible chambers below the cave. It's impossible to stand erect anywhere in it, and often it narrows so much that the only way to move is on hands and knees. After ten or fifteen minutes this difficult journey ends in the Chamber of the Felines, which is only somewhat larger and taller than the tunnel. This is the most remote room in the cave. It has spectacular engravings of lions, but even here more than half of the fifty animals are horses. One engraving is famous because it shows a horse face on. Other than this one, almost every animal in all the known caves is pictured in profile. The last animal in the Chamber of Felines is a bison, or rather the head of a bison. After that, two rows of three red dots, one directly below the other, mark the end of the chamber, where it's impossible to penetrate farther into the cave. Graphically the dots are completely different from the painting of a horse ‘s head at the entrance to the cave, but there is some implied connection between the dots and the horse. The horse ‘s head marks the beginning of the cave and the six dots indicate its termination.
Or, more precisely, they indicate one terminal point. There is a second one. As we have just seen, a left turn at the mound of clay at the end of the Lateral Passage leads to the Chamber of Felines, but a right turn leads to a room called the Apse, which is above the most mysterious and moving place in Lascaux: the Shaft.
Lascaux contains so many paintings and engravings that it alone has one-tenth of all the Paleolithic art known in France. The Apse, though it is smaller than all the other rooms in the cave except for the Chamber of Felines, contains more than half the art in Lascaux. There may have been paintings here that have disappeared, but what we have today are well over one thousand engravings done one right over the other and covered everywhere with random lines and scratches. From the moment of discovery, scholars and laypeople alike have wondered at the contrast between the grand paintings in the rest of the cave and the hundreds of small engravings in the Apse, all packed together in an intoxicating melange that is impossible to decipher entirely.
Even in the most detailed books about Lascaux there is usually a line that says a full discussion of the Apse would require a book in itself. So far that book has not been written because the task is so daunting and the uncertainties are so many. Clearly, though, the engravings in the Apse weren't made as part of an elaborate composition, they weren't created as a setting for any ceremony, and they weren't there to be seen. Piled one on top of the other, they couldn't be seen. The Apse seems to be one place in Lascaux where the act of drawing was itself part of some ritual or ceremony, where the making was more important than the result.
Engravings cover the ceiling of the Apse, which varies from six to nine feet in height. The higher places are among the most intensely decorated, and the artists would have needed scaffolding to reach them. But the Apse is rather wide, unlike the Axial Gallery, where the base of scaffolding could be wedged between the walls. In the Apse the scaffolding must have been freestanding and at least eight feet tall. The artists, or their helpers, must have cut and trimmed pine branches with stone axes, dragged the branches through the Hall of Bulls, and then crawled with them for fifty feet through the Lateral Passage to the Apse. There they constructed the scaffolding, using cords made of leather or plant fiber to secure the branches to one another.
The Apse is directly above the Shaft, a hole in the floor sixteen feet deep, where Ravidat bravely descended by a rope held only by his three young friends. Ever since the discovery, the assumption has been that the Paleolithic people lowered themselves into the Shaft the same way. Support for this theory turned up accidentally one day when researchers inadvertently broke a piece of clay off the wall in the Chamber of Felines. The clay held an impression of a rope of twisted fibers.
If descent by rope was the only access to the Shaft, then visits there in prehistoric times were probably rare. However, Norbert Aujoulat, the French archaeologist who identified the stages of painting the horses in Lascaux, has proved that there was once a separate entrance to the Shaft that allowed direct entry at ground level. He studied the way currents of air had effaced paintings in the area above the Shaft and concluded that a current must have come up from the Shaft. That would have happened only if there had been an opening to the outside. And there was still more evidence—quaint, but decisive. The Shaft contained bones of various tiny animals like mice, hedgehogs, and frogs. These little beasts never penetrate farther than twenty or thirty yards inside a cave. Since the top of the Shaft is considerably farther inside
the cave than that, the mice, hedgehogs, and frogs couldn't have fallen in from above and must have come in by way of a separate, lower entrance. This direct and presumably easier entrance means that prehistoric visits to the Shaft may have been more frequent than previously thought.
Nevertheless, the Shaft and the Chamber of Felines were certainly visited less frequently than the other rooms in the cave. They are at the distant ends of the cave, and they both regularly fill up with carbon dioxide gas. Carbon dioxide can be lethal in high concentrations and is disorienting in lower levels. In recent years researchers have entered the Shaft only to have to leave suddenly when they began to feel the disorienting effects of the gas. One man saw thousands of dots before his eyes; another, while resting in the Apse after having fled the Shaft, thought he was visited by a human shade that spoke to him for several minutes. The gas is odorless and arrives without a sound. Its presence in regular cycles and the hallucinations it caused—as well as the fact that a flame burns less brightly in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide— could have played a role in the mythology that surrounded those parts of the cave and in the ceremonies or private rituals that took place there.
Although the Shaft is not large, the walls offer plenty of space for paintings. Yet—in contrast to the rest of the cave, where paintings and engravings fill up practically all of the available space—there are only four figures and three signs in the Shaft. One wall is devoted to one of the few clearly narrative scenes in all of Paleolithic art. A bison stands with his muzzle tucked against his chest. He has lowered his horns as if he is about to charge or has just made a charge. The animal is enraged. He has raised his tail and the strands of hair in his mane are standing straight up. A long spear lies across his hindquarters and his intestines are pouring out of his belly onto the ground, presumably from the wound made by the spear. The outline of the bison, including his head, mane, and tail, is painted in black, but the animal is cleverly positioned over a large yellow stain in the wall so that the painting appears to be colored in.
A peculiar stick figure of a man is in the act of falling over backward in front of the bison. He has two pointed feet, spindly legs, and an erect penis in the shape of a triangle. Two long lines form an oblong torso that ends in a bird's head and a sharp, open beak that points in the same direction and at the same angle as his penis and feet. His thin arms each end in a set of four lines for fingers—something that looks more like a bird's foot than like a hand. A bird on a stick—the man's totem, perhaps—is either lying next to him or standing stuck in the ground. A stick with a barb at each end lies next to his feet. Some have surmised that this is a spear thrower. That could be, but there are similar figures throughout the cave, so it is more probably an important sign whose meaning is impossible at present to guess.
The bird-man is the only human figure in the cave and the bird on the stick is the only bird. Immediately to the left of them, separated slightly by a crevice in the rock, stands the only rhinoceros. He is outlined in black and his long back has thick shading, but his forelegs and chest are missing entirely. Like the bison, he has raised his tail. Immediately behind it are two rows of three dots, one row immediately below the other. These dots are identical to the six dots at the end of the Chamber of Felines, except for being black instead of red. Since the dots begin immediately to the right of the rhino's raised tail, they have occasionally been interpreted as turds. But that ignores the connection with the red dots in the Chamber of Felines, where nothing suggests that they are excrement, and it also ignores the fact—what is the best way to say this?—that animal turds simply drop straight down and do not fly in formation.
On the opposite wall the head, neck, mane, and back of a horse are outlined in black. This horse is the forgotten figure in the Shaft and is often completely ignored in discussions of the more famous composition of the bird-man and wounded bison on the facing wall. But this figure recalls the similarly incomplete horse in the Hall of Bulls at the entrance to the cave. Also, it is important always to remember that the paintings and engravings in Lascaux show more horses than all the other animal species combined. The presence of a solitary horse in the Shaft must be significant. If there was a separate entrance to the Shaft in prehistoric times, as Aujoulat believes, then this horse might mark that entrance just as a similar incomplete image of a horse marks the entrance to the much larger cave above. But the Shaft is a closed room, which makes it not only the beginning but also the end of a passage, as marked by the six dots. It's a minute opening into the mind of the ancient hunters that the sign of the horse and the sign of the six dots are both present in this small room.
Some of the paintings in the Shaft were made by brush. They include the bird, the six dots, the upper torso of the man, the head of the bison, and the bison's horns. The painter or painters made everything else by blowing the pigments on the rock walls. And there probably were at least two painters. Norbert Aujoulat has made a careful analysis of the pigments and of the techniques used in each painting in the Shaft and has concluded that the rhinoceros was painted at a separate time from all the rest of the paintings there. It's impossible to tell how much time passed between the two paintings, although it likely wasn't too long. Apparently the man, bison, bird, and horse are part of one narrative. The rhino, partially separated from the rest of the scene by the fissure in the rock, may have been some artist-poet's later addition to the tale.
The abbe Breuil, whose discernment and powers of observation were impressive, came to the same conclusion during his studies of the cave during and after World War II. He decreed that the style of painting in the rhino showed that it had been created separately. Nevertheless, he thought it was an integral part of the story. In his masterwork, Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art, he wrote that since “no lance-thrust could thus disembowel a Bison, the presence of the Rhinoceros, calmly strolling off to the left, gives the explanation. It seems to be moving away peacefully after having destroyed all that annoyed it.” For Breuil, the rhino had gored the bison and the enraged bison had then gored the man.
Unfortunately, this reading, prompted by Breuil's insistence that hunting was the theme that informed all the art in the cave, forced him into a rather mundane final interpretation of the scene: “One thing remains to be explained, the post with a barbed end topped by a conventional bird, legless and with almost no tail. It reminds me of the funerary posts of the Eskimos in Alaska or those of the Vancouver Indians. It would be interesting to ascertain if there is not a burial at the foot of this picture, perhaps commemorative of a fatal accident during a hunting expedition.”
In 1947 Breuil initiated a dig at the foot of the Shaft in hopes of finding the grave of the man whose death he presumed was commemorated in the painting. Sadly, both for Breuil's reading of the scene and for archaeology, he didn't find a grave. But he did find some 350 stone tools and other relics. Further excavations twelve years later also turned up much of interest.
There were two reasons why the Shaft held so many relics. First, the floor of the Shaft, luckily, was never dug up for tourists, as most of the rest of the cave was, so the Shaft has remained the most fruitful part of the cave for artifacts. Second, the Paleolithic people dropped things into the Shaft, some perhaps by accident but most apparently on purpose as votive offerings. The digs turned up thirteen spear points, often decorated with barbed lines, like the one at the feet of the man. A similar number of seashells that were used as jewelry turned up. They had once been painted and they still showed traces of red ochre, and they were pierced so that they could hang from a necklace or from fringe on clothes. A number of tools and blades also appeared, as well as dozens of plain lamps that are little more than stones with a small hollow, and one exquisite lamp carved from pinkish sandstone. It is shaped like a broad spoon and decorated with the same barbed lines found on the spear points and in the painting. The presence of so many lamps in the Shaft adds weight to the theory that things took place at times when the carbon dioxide level was high. Ea
ch individual lamp would have burned less brightly in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, so more lamps than usual would have been necessary.
The story of a man and a bison must have been widespread, even a universal myth, during Paleolithic times, since the Shaft scene in Lascaux is not the only confrontation between man and bison in the art in the caves. In Villars, a cave in the same region only about fifty miles from Lascaux, there is a painting of a bison about to charge a thin man. The man is standing and waving his hands above his head as if he wants to provoke the animal. There is a horse painted below this scene. The paintings in Villars are about the same age as those in Lascaux. Rouffignac, a cave about fifteen miles from Lascaux, has a large room with a flat ceiling covered with paintings. In the corner there is a shaft not unlike the one in Lascaux, and here there is a painting of a man's face and two bison, although this time the man and bison are not confronting one another. At Roc-de-Sers, a site slightly farther northwest, a bas-relief shows an almost comical figure of a human threatened by a bison. For this theme to appear so frequently, even with its slight variations, the story of a man and a bison must have been universal, a part of the culture shared by everyone.
To the end of his life Breuil clung to his theory that the paintings in Lascaux and all the other caves were part of rituals of hunting magic. He was aware that the Paleolithic people ate mainly reindeer, while there are no reindeer on the walls of Lascaux. “Now why?” he asks in Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art. And he has a clever explanation: “No doubt because this game, which passed in the autumn in great herds coming from the north, spent the winter in Aquitaine and left in the spring, following for thousands and thousands of years (as in Canada) the same trails, in spite of the ambushing hunters who killed them in hundreds; this game, in the eyes of the Paleolithic men, needed no hunting magic to slay. The Reindeer were very stupid, not very agile, easily secured as they passed; so no magic was necessary for their capture, no more than for the capture of Salmon or other fish in the rivers, very seldom shown in the wall drawings.”
The Cave Painters Page 11