Glenn Cooper - The Tenth Chamber

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.’