To his left was a charging herd of horses, huge beasts boldly rendered in charcoal that overlapped one another, their mouths open in exertion, their manes thick, their pupils piercing black discs afloat in pale ovals of unpigmented rock.
To his right were thundering bison with upraised tails and cloven hooves, all energy and menace, and unlike the horses which were done in stippled black, their massive bodies were fully shaded in bold swathes of black and reddish-brown.
Above his head was a single giant black bull in full motion, running headlong into the cave, two legs off the ground in a full gallop. Its head was lowered, presenting its horns in aggression and its nostrils were flared and its scrotum swelled.
Ahead, to his left and right, were massive stags with racks of antlers half as large as their bodies, their heads turned up, their eyes rolled back and their mouths open in bellowing posture.
And there was more, much more, fantastic creatures he strained to see in the dimming reach of his torch beam – a crush of lions, bears, roe deer, colour, so much colour, and was that the trunk of a mammoth?
Although there was a sense of velocity all around, his feet were firmly rooted to the ground. He must have stood on the same spot for an immeasurable length of time before he became conscious of the pleading shouts coming from below.
He also became aware that he was shaking febrilely and that his eyes were wet. This was more than a moment of discovery. This was Carter at the Valley of Kings, Schliemann at Troy.
In the mouth of the cave alone were dozens of the finest prehistoric paintings he had ever seen, nearly life- size animals done in a confident, masterful, naturalistic style. The great Lascaux Cave had a grand total of some nine hundred beasts. Within his limited sightlines he already saw nearly a quarter as many. And this was the tip of the iceberg. What lay beyond the limits of his torch?
Luc fully realised the weight of the moment – this was potentially even more important than Lascaux or Chauvet. Luc had never shown any interest whatsoever in mapping out his future. He’d always let things just happen in his professional and personal lives. He let himself be carried along by the stream of fate. But in an instant both exhilarating and frightening, he knew he’d be spending the rest of his life here, in this cave on the outskirts of Ruac.
He stepped back towards the fresh air, stuck his head out and had to snap his eyelids shut when Hugo’s beam hit him full-on.
‘Thank God you’re okay!’ Hugo shouted. ‘Why didn’t you answer me?’
All Luc could say was, ‘You need to come up.’
‘Why? What have you found?’
‘This is Barthomieu’s cave!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, it has to be. Climb the same route I took. Carefully. And think about this: your life, my friend, will never be the same again.’
SEVEN
Time became a curious commodity.
At once it crawled to a dead stop and raced ahead at warp speed. That night was both the longest and the shortest in his life and in the future, when Luc spoke about it, people would wrinkle their brows in non- comprehension, which would prompt him to say, ‘Trust me, that’s what it felt like.’
He had given Hugo stern instructions to stand still and keep his hands in his pockets while he twice made the climb down to the ledge to retrieve their rucksacks. When he finished, he aimed his torch over his head to provide a reflected cone of light and delivered a solemn little speech. ‘This is now an archaeological site, a national treasure. We have a responsibility to science, to France and to the world to do this right. We don’t touch anything. You only step where I step. You don’t light any of your foul cigars. If you don’t know what to do, ask.’
‘Christ, Luc, I’m not an idiot.’
Luc playfully swatted him. ‘I thought we already established you were. Let’s go.’
It didn’t take long to prove incontrovertibly, that this was the cave of the manuscript. They quickly found three distinctive paintings – a horse, a stag and a stippled bull – that were identical in every respect to Barthomieu’s illustrations.
Luc trod delicately towards the interior of the cave, training his beam on the guano-encrusted floor before taking each successive step, making sure he wasn’t crushing something precious under his boot. Above their heads, bats were squealing incessantly in ear-splitting, high-pitched urgency. The atmosphere was noxious, not intolerable but undeniably unpleasant. Hugo took his handkerchief and pressed it over his mouth and nose to shield himself from the caustic ammonia sting of the bat urine.
‘Is this going to kill me?’ Hugo complained, shivering in the cool dampness.
Luc was uninterested in any distraction and only said, ‘The handkerchief’s a good idea.’
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.
