Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

“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.”

“You certainly have Leroi-Gourhan’s male principle there,” said Malrand. “But then men do sometimes experience that phenomenon of erection in violent death.”

“Do you have any personal theories about this drawing?” Lydia asked. “Not a scholar’s hypothesis, but your own view.”

“I think it is more than the simple portrayal of the tragic end of a hunt, mademoiselle,” he said. “He may well be a shaman, but certainly I think there is ritual and magic involved, beyond the prosaic explanation of the bird as a hunter’s decoy. It is the only image of violence in the whole cave, and it is a double violence, depicting the death of the shaman and the death of the beast, as if one somehow caused the other. Given the love and celebration of life that we see elsewhere in the cave, to me it does not truly fit.”

“There’s the portrait of early man you wanted, Clothilde,” said Manners. “Killing and being killed. An artistic and philosophical statement on human nature.”

“But incomplete,” replied Clothilde, amiably. “There is more to humankind than that-as we see and as we know from the rest of the cave. If these artists wanted to depict our dark side, then they have overwhelmed it with images of our better nature. So if they are showing man killed and killing, I choose to believe that they have also made art which shows human beings doing better things.”

“There is room for many faiths in this cave, Clothilde,” said Malrand pensively. He had called her Clothilde at last, noted Lydia. “And yours is a noble one. I like to think that you are right.”

Malrand left in his car alone, driven by Lespinasse, and with the escort of security men. His farewells had been charming, his parting kisses to Lydia’s cheeks lingering almost as long as her flood of excitement when he whispered, “You can be assured that the art tax is dead.”

“I wish I could stay longer, but I must be in Paris tonight,” he called as he left for the military airport where his jet waited to whisk him back. Lespinasse exchanged a hearty handshake with Manners. And Lydia was almost convinced she had heard Clothilde whisper “Sorry, Francois,” as he had kissed her farewell.

“Anything after this would be an anticlimax,” said Manners as they clambered into the remaining limousine for the ride back to Malrand’s house.

“I remember the first time I saw it, I felt the same. I still do, a little. It keeps its magic, Lascaux,” said Clothilde. “Let me apologize for imposing that scene on you. I thought it was worth a try, while Malrand was under the spell, but I handled it badly. Let me make amends. Come home with me and I’ll cook us all a meal.”

“I’d love to, Clothilde. I’m full of questions,” he said, and turned to Lydia. “O.K. with you?” She nodded. She didn’t feel like being alone with Manners just yet. Perhaps that flood of lust for him had just been the effect of the cave. She liked him a great deal, but she had never been comfortable with holiday flirtations.

“I wonder when he will announce the new reward?” she asked.

“Very soon, I imagine. No point in delaying. But I suppose he’ll have to talk to the police and culture ministers, probably the finance people.”

“Ah no, my dear Major. Malrand does not work like that. In France, the presidency has its own funds, to be used at the President’s discretion. He will not tell the culture ministry, since the minister would try to steal the credit. He will find some moment when he needs a useful distraction and make the announcement. It should bring results very fast, I imagine.”

“Well, that looks like the end of our adventure, Lydia.”

“Why on earth so? The painting may be recovered, which would be a good thing. But that still leaves the mystery of where it’s from, let alone how your father got hold of it. And it looks as if Clothilde’s cavehunting project is not getting the presidential seal of approval, so we might as well continue our inquiries among the old Resistance types.”

“I have some names for you, and some information,” said Clothilde. “Not very exciting, but one friend of my father-my real father, that is-said he knew of two caves where guns were stored. The big one at Rouffignac, which goes back for miles, and Bara-Bahau. Rouffignac is a possibility. It has been fully explored, but by speleologists, not by modern experts. It’s a small painting, and it’s possible that some great scar on the wall was not noticed.”

“But the lines continue beyond the edge of the rock, and in the background is that clear white calcite,” Lydia objected. “The lines would have been noticed.”

“I know, it’s just a faint possibility. Bara-Bahau is out. It’s too well known, and not much calcite there. I feel sure that Horst was on the right track when he talked of a cave that lay waiting to be discovered, like Lascaux in 1940, and somehow the painting came out and then the cave was sealed again.”

“So your idea of the echo-sounding project would probably be a sure-fire way of finding it again,” said Manners thoughtfully. “Odd that Malrand seemed to be set against it.”

“I think he was set against the idea of being bullied into a commitment, rather than the idea itself,” said Lydia.

“It’s curious,” said Clothilde. “The project seemed guaranteed of success when I first proposed it, long before we heard of your new rock. The Air Force was quite happy, saying it could fit into its training schedule. The Ministry of Culture was in favor, and we had a university and a research institute eager to help. But then it got squashed somewhere in the hierarchy, and I was given different explanations why. The culture officials said they thought it was the finance ministry. The research people said they thought it was political, the Prime Minister’s office muttering that too many funds were being steered to Malrand’s Peri gord. And one of Malrand’s people told me it was because they thought that in a year or so we could get half the project financed by Brussels, from the European fund.”