Its body has a normal appearance, but both its tail and its head are peculiar. The lion's back curves down to the top of the tail, which then extends almost straight out. But a human arm, bent at the elbow, appears near the lion's haunches. The hand is just under the tail and seems to be grabbing for it. This arm is so improbable that Breuil evidently couldn't believe it. His sketch of the lion shows two tails, as if the artist had drawn one and then reconsidered. But it's definitely an arm.
And the lion has two heads. One, attached in a normal position, is turned to face the viewer straight on. It has peculiar, deep eyes and loopy ears that shoot out at odd angles. A second head in three-quarter profile floats unattached just in front of the first. Was this an attempt to show movement? A mistake? Or simply the beginning of a second lion? Inside the body of the lion there are finer lines that may be the head of a horse and a bison that perhaps makes some connection with the bison on the rock at the entrance. A lightly engraved lion cub is to the left of the larger lion—one reason for thinking it may be a lioness after all—and below the rear paws there is a peculiar, elongated bird with an immense beak. And there is another lion's head underneath the lion's chest. It has two round eyes inside a round head. It seemed to stare at me happily out of the wall.
I was still absorbed by the lion when Robert said, “Look here,” as he directed his light into a small fissure in the opposite wall. I peered in and there, almost as if stage-lit in a nook in a dollhouse, was a seashell. It was crescent-shaped, fluted, and about the size of the fingers on a hand. Long ago someone had carefully placed it in the crevice and propped it against the side of the fissure.
Les Trois-Freres is about a hundred miles from the Mediterranean and two hundred miles from the Atlantic. “You mean that shell got here somehow all the way from the sea?” I said.
“No, it was a fossil already,” he said. “They found it and brought it down here.” Robert is a thin man with close-cropped black hair and an easy, natural elegance. It's interesting just to watch him move. He smiled, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. “Who knows why,” he said.
I looked in again at the shell. Unexpectedly, I began shaking slightly and my pulse raced. The strangeness of the cave, the slick rocks and the sucking clay floor, the narrow ladders, the darkness, the disorientation of not knowing where I was, the glowing light in the Chapel, the strange two-headed lion with the human arm under its tail—all that had touched my nerves. But none of it had reached as far into me as that shell did. I didn't know what it meant. And the more I stared at the shell, the more it was simply itself. One day or night fourteen thousand years ago, a man or woman or boy or girl had brought a rare and precious object into this cave and propped it on its edge in a fissure expecting it would remain there for all eternity—and it has.
I turned away from the shell. The hunters had left nine other artifacts in the cracks of the Chapel walls. There were five flint tools, two bone splinters, a bear's molar balanced on its roots, and a burin—that is, a stone chisel. It was set in one of the spaces between the hanging secretions just below the lion's paws, as if the artist, having finished his work, had purposely placed his tool on display.
I followed Robert out of the Chapel and we made our way across 130 yards into a large open room Breuil named Le Trefonds. It's a clever name. A literal translation gives the prosaic “the Subsoil,” but the word also has a literary meaning—the depths of the soul.
Le Trefonds is a vast room with a long slanted rock floor that looks like a glacier descending from the cave wall. At its deepest part there is a thick rock that projects from the wall where there is a single painted bison, almost five feet long. Its horns form a sinuous S-curve and the eye is alive, expectant. The lines for the back and chest gradually fade away, but the shape of the rock perfectly suggests a bison's body. It's a great masterpiece, relatively unheralded because there is so much else in Les Trois-Freres.
About ten yards away and halfway up the slanting rock floor, there was a battered, misshapen metal chair standing in splendid isolation. “My grandfather brought it in for Breuil,” Robert told me. “So it will always stay here.”
On a rock ledge not far away, two engraved owls stood on either side of a younger owl, presumably their chick. The back of one owl is part of a line that also forms the back of a mammoth. An owl and a mammoth are two dissimilar animals, but the artist recognized that if you adjust the scale, an owl's back is identical to one portion of a mammoth's back.
By now, I was feeling more used to the cave. It was wet but not unpleasant, and I was plenty warm enough in my jacket underneath the blue coveralls. We passed many long columns and stalactite curtains that made beautiful formations. The cave is rich with deposits of ochre that often stain the walls red, and this sometimes made it hard to tell what was a painted sign or dot and what was a natural stain.
Here and there in every room, the ancient hunters had stuck pieces of flint into crevices in the walls or shoved flint or bones into the clay floor. Enlene is a cave next to Les Trois-Freres. In fact, in Paleolithic times the only way into Les Trois-Freres was probably through Enlene. That cave has no art, but in one chamber there are about sixty pieces of bone, spearheads, and teeth shoved into the floor. Some of these have engraved diagonal lines. They are distributed over the floor in no discernible pattern, but still, there they are. Nearby, pieces of bone have been stuck into the wall, high and low, in cracks and under ledges, pointing in every direction. Obviously the floors and walls of the cave were important in themselves and weren't just a neutral canvas for art. One theory, which will be discussed later, holds that the cave painters thought there was a world that existed behind the surface of the rock. The paintings were a way of going through the rock to that other world. The bones and stone tools pushed into the wall, and for that matter the shell in the niche in the Chapel that had so affected me, made this theory seem all the more plausible.
At last Robert took me to the Sanctuary, the most famous room in the cave, although without telling me that was where we were headed. That was a subtle gesture that I appreciated as I thought back on my visit because it allowed the cave to speak for itself. The Sanctuary is shaped like a bell. The floor slopes sharply toward the back, where there is a low outcropping that partially hides a low tunnel. I followed Robert there and, like him, lay on my back and shoved myself under the ledge. He shone his light at an angle to the wall, and I saw an intricate tangle of fine, faint engraved lines. At first they appeared to be just a melange of heads, horns, and hooves. The engravings continued along the wall for yards and yards and disappeared around a corner. There were hundreds of them. Robert said there were many more lining the narrow tunnel, and probably more still to be discovered. Everywhere they are packed tight. I later read in Breuil that it often took him more than a month to copy and decipher just a meter's length of these engravings.
“Look just here,” Robert said, pointing to a place on the wall only a few inches from my head. He shifted the lens of his carbide lamp slightly one way and another and then I saw it, one of the most distinctive figures ever found in the caves, one that has provoked and puzzled archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians ever since the Begouen brothers discovered it in 1912. The whole figure is thirteen inches tall. The lower half is clearly a man, because his penis is visible. He is standing on his right leg while his left thigh is brought forward. His left knee is bent because he has just lifted his foot off the ground. He seems to be either dancing or taking a studied, marching step. But the upper half of this strange figure is a bison. He has a round, hairy belly with a tuft of fur at his navel, a hairy mane on his back, and a bison head with two curving horns. His two arms are really bison legs that end in hooves. Is this a picture of a mythical bison-man or is it a man who has put on a bison head and hide? And, supposing it is a real man parading in a bison disguise, is he doing so as a hunter to fool his prey or is he imitating the mythical bison-man in a ritual dance?
Lying there, I thought at first t
hat he was certainly hunting because there is dramatic tension in the setting for this strange beast-man. He is facing straight ahead toward a hooved, four-legged animal that appears to be his prey. This animal has turned back to look at him. But the supposed prey is also a mythical beast. Its head is more or less like a bison's, but not entirely. Its body is like a deer's.
The answer to what is really going on seems to lie in two faint lines lying across the bison-man's right “arm.” One line is curved slightly and the other straight, and they touch at each end. It looks like a bow, and a bow would prove that he was hunting. When the bow and arrow first appeared in history is still unresolved, but it was probably after the age of the painted caves. At any rate, there isn't any evidence, except perhaps this small engraving, that the Paleolithic hunters used bows and arrows. And this bow, if that is what it is, is resting across the figure ‘s right “arm” about where the elbow would be. That is not at all the way anyone has ever held a bow and arrow.
However, it is in exactly the position the bison-man would hold a musical bow if he were playing the violin. But—how strange!— one end of the bow is stuck in the bison-man's nostril. Could this be a picture of the world's first nose flute? The name sounds comical, but the nose flute has a long history and appears in cultures around the world. Played like a kazoo, a nose flute produces a surprising amount of racket. And if the “bow” is really a musical instrument, that would be consistent with the purposeful dancing, prancing position of the bison-man's left leg. Why then, I wondered, would the bison-deer animal be looking back at the bisonman?Perhaps it is attracted—or alarmed—by the sound of the flute.
I lay looking at the engravings for a long time, shifting my shoulders from time to time to get a better angle of vision or scooting over to a slightly new position. Tiny rocks on the floor poked me now and then, but I rather enjoyed the sound my coveralls made scraping over them. Although the engravings contained a large bestiary including rhinos, bears, and ibex, three species predominated, each in its turn. First bison, then horses, then reindeer. Some of the engravings were large, but most were small. A few of the most beautiful were very small. There was a perfect horse ‘s head with fine detail and full of expression that was no bigger than my fingernail. There was a bear with fifty or sixty small circles on his body and long lines coming out of his mouth as if he were vomiting blood. This, for once, appeared to be a hunting scene. A bison floated above the bear. It had marks like spears hanging from its body. And a horse with twenty or thirty spears reared up just to the left of the bear. Still farther to the left, in a panel crowded with at least twenty-five bison and a handful of horses, another small bison-man appeared with his head turned to look behind him. This figure has human thighs and a prominent penis. Again, he could be either a mythical figure or a man disguised as a bison to creep in among the herd. Breuil remained noncommittal and called him simply a “small, complex being,” which, I had to admit, he is.
Certain figures stood out because they were larger or more deeply engraved, but mostly the animals were one on top of another in a jumble. It was clear, however, that there was no intent to damage the lower engravings. They were simply drawn over, and then over again. They were not marked out, destroyed, or replaced. Instead they seemed more like a running ledger that might be read through, the way a modern archaeologist reads through layer upon layer at a dig. I turned to Robert. “The history of the tribes?” I asked.
He smiled exactly as he had in the Chapel of the Lioness and shrugged the same way, too. “Perhaps,” he said, “but we don't know.”
We got back to our feet, and Robert led me to a spot a few yards back from where we had been lying. He pointed his light at a place on the wall near the ceiling. He didn't say anything. He just waited. I looked at the wall, then at him, then back at the wall. “Oh, my God,” I said as I finally made out the figure, “there it is.”
Breuil and Count Henri named him the Sorcerer in the first moments after they saw him, although Breuil later came to believe he was “the ‘God’ of the Trois-Freres.” Not that he is particularly large. He is about thirty inches high and eighteen inches wide. He is engraved, but parts of him are painted black, and thus he is the only painted figure among the many hundreds of engravings in the Sanctuary. His eyes are two black circles with black, round pupils looking straight ahead. His nose is a single line between them that ends in a small arc. A long, pointed beard that reaches to his chest covers the rest of his face. He even seems to have a thick handlebar mustache that turns up at the ends. He has the ears of a stag. They are pricked up and turned forward as if something has caught his attention. Two stag's antlers sprout from the top of his head. He has the long body of a horse, outlined with thick stripes of black paint, and a horse's tail that is also partially painted. His arms are more human than not. He's holding them together in front of him. They end in what appear to be five long fingers but no thumb. His sizable penis, while not erect, sticks out beneath his tail. He has muscular human legs bent at the knee. They, too, are colored in with black paint. He has lifted one foot as if he is walking, prancing, or dancing. He is a moving, bearded man-stag-horse who knows we are here and has suddenly turned to look right at us.
The Sorcerer is near the ceiling, about fifteen feet above the cave floor and next to a large round fissure in the wall. As he looks down over everything below, his power is amplified by the fact that it appears impossible for anyone to climb up there to paint him. He seems to stand alone, generated by his own power. In fact, there are convenient outcroppings, most of them concealed by turns in the rock, which the artist probably climbed. Breuil rediscovered them and used them to get in position to make his copy. He was also able to climb up into the fissure next to the Sorcerer, where he found a few more engravings. His often difficult scrambling around on the rocks led him to a perceptive supposition: “All these complicated hidden passages lent themselves to extraordinary effects which would be inexplicable to uninitiated novices, who must have been deeply impressed. I will not try to revive these ancient ceremonies. The effect of songs, cries or other noises, or mysterious objects thrown from no one knows where, was easy to arrange in such a place.”
There were many more engravings, including a large phallus carved out of the rock. The larger engravings, like the bison in Le Trefonds, tend to use features in the wall to enhance their effects. Here in the Sanctuary a small dome on a flat area of rock becomes the hump of a large bison below and to the left of the Sorcerer. Two bovine legs bridge a cavity suggesting a female and her sex. Another bison has turned its head to look behind it. The head is carved on a part of the rock that bends back on itself. These larger animals on the walls below the Sorcerer are seldom carved over; it is as if they were permanent symbols with honored places on the walls that played their part over and over again in whatever happened here. As part of the ceremony some people must have lain at the foot of the wall as Robert and I had and engraved over the same area again and again, making new animals over old ones, until for reasons known to them, and not to us, they deemed that the space was full and moved a short way down the wall to a fresh spot and began again. Or maybe there were many who lined up along the wall, all furiously engraving at once.
Robert and I left the cave then. It was twilight when we emerged. After he had locked the doors, we got back into his peculiar little truck and bounced along the road. In a few minutes we arrived at a stone building down the hill from the chateau that serves both as Robert's office and a private museum. As I was taking off my boots and coveralls, which were caked everywhere with gray mud from the cave, Robert disappeared, but he returned in a few moments with some glasses and a bottle of wine. His office is lined with bookshelves and has a comfortable sitting area in front of a large wooden desk. Eric, Robert's son, joined us along with his exuberant big dog and a couple of young archaeologists who were studying at the caves.
After a few moments of quiet talk, Robert asked me to write something about my visit in a large bound ledger w
here every visitor to the caves enters his or her impressions. I took the book to Robert's desk and opened it to the last entry. I drew a line beneath it and wrote the date. Then I stared at the blank space on the page. I was so overflowing and overcharged with impressions and also so convinced that I had been as close as I would ever be—physically close—to The Truth that I could hardly think. The few words that came to me seemed to be insignificant by comparison, like bits of dust.
CHAPTER 9
A Passage Underwater;
The Skull on a Rock
“Oh, I know just what you mean,” Jean Clottes said two days later. “The same thing happens at Chauvet. I mean even to professional, experienced people who've been in hundreds of caves. They're completely overcome. It's just so much. We don't expect any work out of them until the next day or even the day after that.”
“I ended up just writing something stupid,” I said. “I don't even know what it was.”
“Well, that's it,” Jean said. “That's just what happens.”
We were riding in his car through the low Pyrenees to the west of Foix. It was Sunday afternoon. Here and there groups of local farmworkers and their wives sat in clusters rather solemnly. The men frequently had rifles near at hand. “They're trying to shoot wild boar,” Jean said. “There are beaters down in the trees trying to flush them out. The peasants have an elaborate system for deciding who gets what cut of meat depending on who shot the boar, who saw it first, and so on.”
The Cave Painters Page 17