Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“Who did it?” Caroline asked. “Hector?”

Adam said, “No, not Hector. Even he can’t remember who shaped it, or how our ancestors set it here, but for as long as any of us can recall, it has stood at the base of this wall, at the mouth of this gallery: a memorial and a numen.”

“A numen?” Caroline handed me a flash attachment. I plugged it into the Nikon and took a series of photographs of the statue.

“A presiding spirit,” Brian told Caroline. “The creative energy of the caves and of the habilines.”

“Abraxas, if you like,” RuthClaire said.

I looked at her in the wavering light of Adam’s lamp. “What?”

“Not the art gallery,” she said.

“Then what?”

“In Christian Gnosticism, Abraxas was the god of day and night. The long, bitter day of Adam’s people is nearly over. Down here, it’s already given way to night.”

“We must move,” Adam said. “To stay too long is to tire the eyes so they begin to play tricks. You’ll see statues where none exist, wall paintings where none have been painted. Huge figures at a distance will seem tiny figures in a nearby niche. Tiny statues nearby will seem colossi viewed from across a chamber of humbling bigness. Please, let’s move on.”

We obeyed, and what Adam predicted would happen, happened. The longer we stayed underground the less reliable our perceptions of what he was showing us. Today I have a photographic record of our trip through the Montaraz catacombs, but these photos cannot communicate the impact of beholding such powerful art in its hallucinatory natural setting. Even my panoramas of the largest subterranean vaults cannot evoke the feel—the claustrophobic awe—of standing in those places and drinking in the glory of what the habilines had done. Once sundered from the context of the caves, the art loses meaning as well as immediacy. Like the Upper Paleolithic artists who painted the deep galleries of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, Adam’s people had decorated their grottoes, corridors, and rotundas for complicated religio-historical purposes—rites of initiation and socialization—that would fail of fulfillment anywhere else. You had to be there for the art to have context, and the art had to have context for its beholders to internalize the sacredness and force of what they saw. That the caves eventually deceive the eye and disorient the body only adds to their importance in shaping the experience of the initiates. What, then, either “correctly” or “incorrectly,” did we see?

With Adam as guide, and with Brian and RuthClaire as additional torchbearers (they had flashlights), we saw all we could see without crawling, rappelling, or sprouting wings and flying. Here on Montaraz, a school of habiline Michelangelos had rendered the entire history of their species in red, black, yellow, and glowing-white symbols. This chronicle began with a parade of East African animals migrating in discrete herds along the wall leading away from the primeval habiline; it concluded with a procession of gunrunning boats, cruiseships, and propeller-driven pot planes along the way leading back to this anguished figure.

In between, deeper into the mountain, these same artists and their descendants had painted awesome murals synopsizing their people’s years on the savannah, their uneasy relationships with Homo erectus and Homo sapiens , their furtive exile in the foothills of Lolitabu, the dwindling of their numbers during this protracted time, the capture of their surviving remnant by Kikembu warriors, their humiliation and sale in the slave market of Zanzibar, their painful sea voyage from the Island of Cloves to the Isle of Coffee and Cacao, their years of labor on the Rutherfords’ plantations, and their near-extermination by the Tontons Macoutes of Papa Doc Duvalier in the early 1960s.

These sprawling, almost phosphorescent murals took our breath away. Moreover, in front of each one stood a rock carving that subtly glossed the mural’s principal theme. Among these statues were a droll granite hippopotamus, a dying australopithecine, and a family of cave bats hanging upside down. I thought Brian would squeeze his eyeballs out of his sockets examining these works. Adam kept reminding him to stop touching the statuary and the paintings, particularly the murals, for too much touching would alter or deface them. Although the habilines’ pigments had strong color fastness, and although their artists had applied them only to the most absorbent rock faces, the preservation of this subterranean wonder still depended on its visitors’ respectful manners.

“You can’t continue to keep this secret!” Brian’s words bounced off a stagger of receding walls.

“We have to,” RuthClaire said. “To save it.”

“But Mr. Loyd’s taking pictures. Do you believe that after they’re published, another plague of professional schemers won’t swoop down on Montaraz?”

Adam said, “But these pictures, he won’t be publishing.”

“Then why am I taking them?”

“As a record,” Adam said. “If anything should destroy this magnificence, whether vandals, war, or volcanic eruption.”

Caroline asked what photos, of what art, I would be allowed to publish or to carry to gallery owners in my agent’s portfolio. Adam replied that he was not asking me to represent the dead habiline cave artists, but instead Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. It was their work that I’d come to photograph for business purposes, not the paintings and statuary now surrounding and thoroughly overawing us. I would also be given the chance to take some of their work back to Atlanta with us. Granted, I was presently taking celluloid inventory of these refrigerated basilica naves, but that was only a sidelight—an important one—of Caroline’s and my voyage to Montaraz. We had come to help the living rather than the dead. The dead were beyond our help, if not our memory and our gratitude.

“Where are Erzulie’s and the others’ paintings?” Caroline asked.

“In Prix-des-Yeux,” Adam said. “Mister Paul could have photographed them this morning, but we became involved in our free election for a species name. It’s best to visit caves early in the day so that nightfall does not catch us belowground. When we get back, you can see the paintings in Erzulie’s hut.”

“How could they compare to these?” Brian made a sweeping gesture.

“Why should they?” RuthClaire said. “They’re altogether different.”

“Not really,” Adam said. “Hector and Erzulie did some of the cave paintings—farther on—of the Duvalier persecution: bogeymen with rifles, our young ones thrown from cliffs, and so forth.”

“I understand their doing so,” Brian said. “Hector and Erzulie were alive during that very bad time. But this stuff—” he pointed at a two-dimensional scene of a habiline hunting party chasing a pack of jackals off a kill—“well, none of the Rutherford Remnant could have experienced it. None of your cave painters ever lived in Africa. Even more obvious is the fact that none of them lived there two million years ago.”

“Very true,” Adam said.

“So how did they render the entire history of their people in this unbelievably glorious way?”

“ Vaudun ,” RuthClaire said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Voodoo and revelation,” RuthClaire told Brian. “All the way back in the 1870s, local houngans and mambos began putting Les Gens in touch with their species’ collective unconscious. Adam figures that the earliest of these paintings date from then. Later, some of the habilines became priests or priestesses themselves. Erzulie’s a current example. In a less thoroughgoing way, so’s my Adam. He always dresses like Papa Guedé—Baron Samedi, if you prefer—when he comes up here, to insure a sympathetic continuity between the dead habilines of Africa and those on Montaraz who spiritually rediscovered them through voodoo.”