Oslo! I repeated, as we turned into Upper Street. The way her head now rested on my shoulder told me she was dead.
You said it rhymed with First Snow, she said.
6 Le Pont d’Arc
Month of February. Slight frost at night. 21 °C at midday. Cloudless sky above the village of Vogué on the east bank of the Ardèche. The sound of water flowing over, polishing, shifting stones. The river, full of swirls, fast-flowing, metallic-looking in the sunlight, is less than twenty metres wide. It tugs like a dog at the imagination, asking for you to come for a walk. A notoriously capricious river whose level can rise six metres in less than three hours. In it, I’m told, there are pike, but no sandre.
I watch the birds upstream as they dive across the silver surface. Earlier this morning I went to pray for Anne in the church under the limestone cliffs. She is the mother of my friend Simon and is dying in her house with a garden in Cambridge. If I could, I would have sent her the sound of the Ardèche with its unwavering yet imprecise promise.
The waters of the Ardèche have made many caves in the plateau of the Bas Vivarais and, from time immemorial, the caves have offered shelter to the intrepid. On my way here I gave a lift to a man from Lyon who had ’no money but a lot of time on his hands’. I guess he had lost his job. He had been walking through the area since January, sleeping at night wherever he found a cave. Tomorrow, thirty kilometres downstream, I will visit the Chauvet cave which was rediscovered for the first time since the last ice age in 1994. And there I will be looking at the oldest known rock paintings in the world, 15,000 years older than the paintings of Lascaux or Altamira.
During a relatively warm period in the last ice age the climate here was between 3 °C and 5 °C colder than it is today. The trees were limited to birches, Scots pine and juniper. The fauna included many species who are now extinct: mammoths, megaceros deer, cave lions without manes, aurochs and bears who were three metres tall, as well as reindeer, ibex, bison, rhinoceros and wild horses. The human population of nomadic hunter-gatherers was sparse and lived in groups of about twenty to twenty-five. Paleontologists name this population Cro-Magnon, a term which distances, yet the distance between them and us may be less than we think. Neither agriculture nor metallurgy existed. Music and jewellery did. The average life expectancy was twenty-five.
The need for companionship while alive was the same. The Cro-Magnon reply, however, to the first and perennial human question of: Where are we? was different from ours. The nomads were acutely aware of being a minority who were overwhelmingly outnumbered by animals. They had been born, not on to a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were the keepers of the world and of the universe around them which never stopped. Beyond every horizon were more animals.
At the same time, they were distinct from animals. They could make fire and therefore had light in the darkness. They could kill at a distance. They fashioned many things with their hands. They made tents for themselves, held up by mammoth bones. They spoke. They could count. They could carry water. They died differently. Their exemption from animals was possible because they were a minority, and, as such, the animals could pardon them for this exemption.
At the beginning of the Ardèche gorges is the Pont d’Arc, a bridge whose almost symmetrical 34-metre-high arch has been carved out by the river itself. On the southern bank stands a tall outcrop of limestone whose weathered silhouette suggests a giant in a cloak striding towards the bridge in order to cross it. Behind him on the rock face are yellow and red stains — ochre and iron oxide — painted by the rain. If the giant were to cross the bridge, he would almost immediately, given his size, find himself up against the opposite cliffs, near the top of which he would find the Chauvet cave.
Both bridge and giant were there at the time of the Cro-Magnons. The only difference being that 30,000 years ago, when the paintings were being painted, the Ardèche meandered up to the foot of the cliffs, and the natural path which I am climbing would regularly have been crossed by animals coming down, species by species, to drink from the river. The cave was strategically and magically placed.
The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years. We live in a culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress which has so far lasted two or three centuries. Today’s culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.
Silence. I turn off the helmet lamp. A darkness. In the darkness the silence becomes encyclopedic, condensing everything that has occurred in the interval between then and now.
On a rock in front of me, a cluster of red squarish dots. The freshness of the red is startling. As present and immediate as a smell, or as the colour of flowers on a June evening when the sun is going down. These dots were made by applying red oxide pigment to the palm of a hand and then pressing it against the rock. One particular hand has been identified on account of a disjointed little finger, and another imprint of the same hand has been found elsewhere in the cave.
On another rock, similar dots, making an overall shape which is like the side view of a bison. The marks of the hands fill the animal’s body.
Darkness.
Before the women, men and children arrived (there is a footprint of a child of about eleven in the cave) and after they left for good, the place was inhabited by bears. Probably also by wolves and other animals, but the bears were the masters with whom the nomads had to share the cave. On wall after wall, the scratches of bear paws. Footprints show where a bear walked with her cub, feeling her way in the dark. In the largest and most central of the cave’s chambers, which is fifteen metres high, there are numerous wallows or depressions in the clay on the ground where bears lay asleep during their winter hibernation. One hundred and fifty bear skulls have been found here. One of them had been solemnly placed — probably by a Cro-Magnon — on a kind of rock plinth in the furthest reach of the cave.
Silence.
In the silence, the extent and size of the place begins to count for more and more. The cave is half a kilometre long and sometimes fifty metres wide. Geometrical measurements, however, do not apply because one is inside something like a body.
The standing and overhanging rocks, the enclosing walls, with their concretions, the passages, the hollow spaces which have developed through the geological process of diagenesis, resemble, to a remarkable degree, the organs and spaces within a human or animal body. What they all have in common is that they look like forms created by flowing water.
The colours of the cave too are anatomical. The carbonate rocks are bone- and tripe-coloured, the stalagmites scarlet and very white, the calcite draperies and concretions orange and snotty. Surfaces glisten as if wet with mucus.
A massive stalactite has grown (they grow at the rate of one centimetre per century) to look somewhat like a stomach’s intestines, and, at one point in their descent, the tubes suggest the four legs, tail and trunk of a miniature mammoth. The reference could easily be missed and so a Cro-Magnon painter, with four brief lines in red, brought the tiny mammoth nearer.
Many walls that might have lent themselves to being painted on have not been touched. The 400-odd animals depicted here are distributed as unobtrusively as in nature. There are no pictorial displays as in Lascaux or Altamira. There is more emptiness, more secrecy, perhaps greater complicity with the darkness. Yet, although these paintings are 15,000 years earlier, they are, mostly, as skilful, observant and graceful as any of the later paintings. Art, it would seem, is born like a foal who can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.