Visitors were met on the site by troops of children who clustered around them and without any preliminaries started to intone a sort of lament, not one word of which was comprehensible. They churned it out in rapid monotones, as if they were reciting fables or the articles of the catechism, with the voice falling at the end of each phrase, which obliged the little officiants to keep taking noisy breaths before embarking on the next phrase. What was it all about? We found out much later: it was the legend of Saint Comely, who, pursued by the Roman legions, was only saved by the intervention of the Lord, whose sacred breath had turned this army of assailants into stone statues. The government of the day hadn’t thought of repatriating them, as is usual with the bodies of soldiers, and we were very glad of it because, apart from their removal being a tricky business, it would have meant the end of Carnac. But at the time, although we listened with all our ears, and did manage to catch a couple of identifiable syllables on the wing and put them together to reconstitute a word, it was extremely difficult to render unto Caesar his legions, and unto God his petrifying breath. As a result the mystery of the standing stones thickened and was coupled with a further question: What language were they expressing themselves in? in the Auray patois? in Gallo-Vannetois? in proto-Gallic? in low Latin? in pig Latin? in low Breton? in musical comedy Breton? It was Greek to us. Unless, possessed by a phenomenon inherent in that haunted place, moved by one of those secret turns of mind that can even manage to make tables speak, what came out of the mouths of the medium-istic little bards was the original language of the ancient builders, like a delayed action echo sent back by the stone walls. However that may be, these children were not slow on the uptake, because the moment their anthem was finished they held out their hands in the pure tradition of “don’t forget the guide.” Then the fathers would open their purses and halfheartedly search for the coin they judged adequate to reward the singing and the music. Because with regard to the part that interested us, the words, we were far from having had our fill. Then someone remarked that it was the same with opera, you never understood what they were saying, although considering the general ineptitude of the text this was just as well. All the emotion was transmitted through the music. Applied to our little choristers, whose monotonous notes didn’t allow the slightest depth of feeling to filter through, such a remark made you think that the solid architects of the savage ages must have had hearts of stone.
We were never to learn any more. After that, we all tried to work it out for ourselves by strolling up and down the pathways, the children providing the beginnings of a solution by climbing onto everything they found climbable. Our very own Creator-Designer insisted on the size of the stones, the difficulty of moving, sometimes over many kilometers, such considerable masses. All the more so in that the same thing applied to menhirs as to icebergs — you also had to consider the buried part that ensured the stability of the block. If he insisted so much on what we couldn’t see, it was of course because invisible things open on infinity, but it was also because we were finding it difficult to work up much enthusiasm. Prepared by our great man, we were expecting to see a field full of Eiffel Towers, and skyscrapers of carved stone, instead of which no more than a handful of them managed to rise to twelve feet. And even then, it was better to be small yourself.
There is no improvisation in Carnac. It isn’t like towns that have gradually grown rich, like Venice or Amsterdam, where merchants and bankers, as the years went by and as the fancy took them, were constantly trying to outdo each other with more beautiful, bigger, and flashier buildings than those of their rivals. But here in Carnac, a single project had been conceived and carried to term. And in a very short time: if it had been spread over some decades the initial plan, like that of a cathedral, would have been modified a hundred times. The recipe is simple: strong arms, an efficient foreman, an inspired architect, and a tyrannical prince. That’s enough. The stones, erected within a couple of steps of the coast as if to form a rampart against the violence of the waves and the furious sea wind, are regularly spaced, orientated from east to west, and aligned in eleven or thirteen rows in decreasing order. If they were hollow, you could imagine fitting them one into the other like Russian dolls.
With time, many of them have disappeared: sold, reused, taking refuge in the wall of a fisherman’s house or enclosing a pasture — the smallest ones at first, the easiest to move, the ones at the end of the row. If the order had been respected, the final stone in these alignments ought to have been the size of a grain of sand, a progressive dissolution into Mother Earth, or, starting from the east, a little grain of stone, a mineral seedbed, ending in the forest of the giants in the west. It was where this theoretical grain of sand would have been that we discovered, in the short grass near a tuft of sea pinks, the sort that grow along the Atlantic Coast, the corpse of a bird: its little body was emaciated, its neck bare as if death had removed its scarf; it had a bluish speck on its eye, a half-open beak, and its little vermicelli legs were folded like the frame of a dainty parasol. A few feathers still sticking to the fragile skeleton of its wing were flapping gently in the breeze.
Father knelt down by the tiny corpse, the better to observe it, no doubt, but in an attitude that was so reverent, so full of commiseration, that we imitated him and formed a circle around it, Mother being the only one to remain on her feet. We were on the threshold of a miracle of childish simplicity, convinced that Father was going to breathe life into the miniature breast, that its flesh would heal, its wings would beat again and then carry the rejuvenated bird up into the sky. As when the tombs of the blessed are opened, from these few grams of decomposed flesh there arose the sweet fragrance of the sea pinks. This perfumed message brought hope and consolation.