Glenn Cooper - The Tenth Chamber

When Tailifer asked how they had come to camp on the grounds of the Abbey, Luc told him about his amusingly rude treatment by the Mayor of Ruac and hearing this, the politician clucked knowingly.

‘He’s a disgrace, that Bonnet, a jerk, if I may say, but please don’t quote me,’ he spat heatedly. ‘I don’t know him well, but I do know him. You know why they say he and his village are so unfriendly?’

Luc did not.

‘The legend is that the town got filthy rich from piracy! You never heard that? No? Well, that’s probably a fairy tale but it’s a fact there was a famous hijacking in the Perigord in the summer of 1944 during the war. The Nazis had a very rich cargo on a military train, huge deposits looted from the Banque de France, art work, antiques and such, all headed to Bordeaux for transfer to German naval authorities. The Resistance struck the main railway line, near Ruac, and made off with a fortune, maybe two hundred million euros in today’s money, and some very famous paintings, including, it’s rumoured, Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, all on their way to Goering personally. Some of the loot made it to de Gaulle in Algiers and was put to good use, I’m sure, but a lot of that money and the art disappeared into thin air. The Raphael was never seen again. There’ve always been rumours that the good people of Ruac developed their charming ways because they’re still covering up for the theft, but you know how these stories go. Still, don’t ever ask anyone in that village about the Resistance and the train robbery or you might get shot yourself!’

Tailifer’s aide reminded him of their next engagement and the man hurriedly finished his drink, handed Luc his empty glass and excused himself.

Luc tried to find Sara in the crowd but was buttonholed by the Palaeolithic art expert, Zvi Alon, and Karin Weltzer, the Pleistocene geologist, who wanted to talk about the next day’s logistics. Luc couldn’t decide who was pushier, the bald, bullet-headed Israeli or the pugnacious German woman in bib overalls. While he was calming both of them down and giving assurances their needs would be well met, he noticed that Sara and the young Spanish archaeologist, Carlos Ferrer, were chatting.

He was about to join them when the Le Monde editor, a phlegmatic senior journalist named Gerard Girot, approached Luc to catch his personal thoughts on the momentous occasion. Luc politely accommodated him and the man began scribbling furiously in his notebook.

Out of the corner of his eye, Luc saw Sara and Ferrer slip the light of the camp fire for the darkness.

He still had champagne in his glass and he found himself gulping it down.

They looked more like astronauts than archaeologists.

The ecosystem of a cave sealed for centuries was a finely tuned affair. The melange of conditions – the temperature, the humidity, the pH and the gaseous balance of the chamber courtesy of the bats – all contributed to an environment that, in this particular case, had fortuitously yielded the excellent preservation of wall art.

The worst thing Luc could do was disrupt that equilibrium and start a chain reaction of destruction such as had occurred elsewhere. At Lascaux, years of unfettered access by scholars and tourists had led first to a scourge of green mould and more recently to white calcite patches, the result of excess CO 2, which now threatened the paintings. Presently Lascaux was sealed to allow the scientific community the opportunity to find solutions.

At Ruac, better an ounce of prevention from the start.

While Desnoyers, the bat man, was arguably the most popular team member, Luc considered the conservationist, Elisabeth Coutard, to be the most important. There’d be hell to pay for an early mould problem or other environmental catastrophe.

Just after dawn on Monday, Luc, Coutard, Desnoyers and the cave expert, Giles Moran, stood in single file on the cliff ledge beneath the cave mouth. They were poised to ascend the iron stairs that the engineers had sunk into the limestone face. Close behind, Luc’s grad students Pierre and Jeremy were laden-down with packs of Moran’s patented cave-floor mats, rubberised semi-rigid sheets designed to protect any delicate treasures that might lie underfoot.

Moran had a tough nubbin of a body, ideal for wiggling through the tightest cave passages. He’d be responsible, for not only the protection of the cave and safety of the explorers, but for the detailed laser-guided mapping of the chamber architecture.

Coutard was a statuesque, almost courtly woman who curled her long white hair into a practical bun. She back-packed several pieces of her most delicate electronic gear and Luc lugged the rest.

Desnoyers had an infrared light strapped to his forehead, night-vision goggles and when he walked, he rattled with assorted traps dangling from his belt.

They were clad in hooded white Tyvek coveralls, rubber gloves, miners’ hats and disposable respirators to protect against toxic gases and shield the cave from their germs. After the entry team posed for an archival photograph of them stretched out on the ladder like Everest climbers Luc unlocked the heavy gate and swung it open.

The expedition had officially begun.

The early-morning light softly illuminated the first few metres of the vault. Luc took immense pleasure watching Coutard’s reaction to the frescoes and when he switched on a series of tripod lamps, vividly illuminating the entire first chamber, she stopped dead in her tracks, like the biblical pillar of salt and said nothing, absolutely nothing. She simply breathed in and out through her mask, transfixed by the beauty of the galloping horses, the power of the bison herd, the majesty of the great bull.

Moran behaved more like a surgeon, glancing about quickly to get his bearings then setting to work on his patient, carefully laying the first ground mats. Desnoyers scuttled onto one of them. He trained his night scope on the ceiling. ‘ Pipistrellus pipistrellus,’ he said, waving his arm matter-of-factly at a few darting shapes overhead, but then he got excited and piped up, ‘ Rhinolophus ferrumequinum!’ and started to step off the mat to follow a larger flapping form into the darkness. Moran sharply admonished him and insisted he wait for the placement of more mats.

‘I take it he’s found something delightful,’ Luc remarked to Coutard.

She replied with a beautiful, heavy sigh, overcome with emotion, seemingly surprised at the effect it was having on her. Luc patted her shoulder and said, ‘I know, I know.’ The touch brought her back to the here and now. She collected herself and got to work deploying an array of environmental and micro-climate monitors: temperature, moisture, alkalinity, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and the all-important culture media for bacteria and fungi. Baseline readings had to be taken before the others could begin their work.

Drawing on lessons from the past, a protocol had already been established. The fieldwork would be limited to two fifteen-day campaigns per year. Only twelve people at a time would be allowed inside the cave and they would work in shifts on an alternating schedule. Those who weren’t inside the cave would have analytical tasks back at the base camp.

Much of that first shift was devoted to laying protective mats along the entire length of the cave and installing Coutard’s analytical gear at various points.

Moran used his LaserRace 300 to measure the linear length of all ten chambers of the cave at 170 metres, a tad shorter than Lascaux or Chauvet.

Packs of mats were lowered from the cliff top in a continuous line of student manpower, akin to sandbaggers at a levee. Luc was obliged to wait for each section of mats to be laid before he could revisit deeper chambers. In a way, he already missed the blissful freedom of his first day of discovery, when he could roam freely and let each wave of adrenalin carry him along. Today he was a more scientist than explorer. Everything had to be done according to protocol.