The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

very, very shy.”
    “So am I,” he said. “Like a very foolish young boy.”
    She put her hand to his mouth to silence him, gazing at him with a kind of fascination as if he had told her an extraordinary secret. Her hand moved to his cheek, became a caress, and she leaned down to kiss his lips. The kiss lingered and he stroked her hair, feeling the soft mass of it. She sat up briefly, and her breasts thrust forward against her white coat as she put her hands to her head to loosen some pins and the hair tumbled down. He stroked her breasts through the cloth; she shook her head to send her hair dancing loose about her face, and her face softened into a very secret smile and she helped him undo the buttons.
    “Not before the war, and not after the war,” she said finally as they lay, spent and entwined, sharing one of the English cigarettes François had left him. “Just now. That’s all there is. Just a little time for us.”

CHAPTER 13
Time: The Present
    T he director of the Lascaux cave was waiting to greet them. He seemed to have been waiting some time. Awed by the eminence of his visitor, he had a fresh haircut and wore an obviously new shirt and tie. Alongside him stood half a dozen members of the staff, some of them from the duplicate cave for the tourists that lay farther along the hillside. There were guides and a gardener, an electrician and a woman who ran the refreshment kiosk. Malrand solemnly shook each of them by the hand, and Clothilde kissed cheeks with the guides. The director gave them each white coats, new hard hats, and plastic overshoes.
    “Much of the damage was done not just by the breath of the visitors, as you sometimes hear, but from the microorganisms carried in on their shoes,” the director explained. He bent obsequiously to tie his President’s overshoes, and rose to hand him a small face mask. Lydia, who had begun to presume this was almost a customary postprandial treat for Malrand’s guests, suddenly realized the director had never met his President before. This was a rare occasion. She felt honored, but inquisitive as ever.
    “But were not the microorganisms similar to those already here?” Lydia asked.
    “They have changed. Benzene, fertilizers—the very air we breathe is infused with our own modernity. We must protect the cave against it. The first problem we suffered was the green disease, a kind of plant growth that was probably helped by the warmth of the lighting system in the damp air. The second problem was the white disease, the tendency of the calcite crystals to grow in such conditions, helped by the carbon dioxide breathed out by more than a million visitors.” It had the sound of a prepared speech, Lydia thought. He’s probably said it a hundred times. “Remember that the cave had been sealed in its pristine environment for seventeen thousand years, until a tree fell in a storm in September 1940, and young Marcel Ravidat took his dog for a walk. The dog fell down the hole left by the tree, and Marcel went down to rescue it. He came back with some school friends, and they explored the cave and found the paintings. They told their teacher, a Monsieur Léon Laval, and he contacted the greatest living expert on prehistoric art, the Abbé Henri Breuil, who came almost at once and stayed to marvel.”
    He unlocked an iron door and led them into a dark tunnel, lit only by a dim blue light, which gave way to a chamber with smoothed walls, and then a flight of steps downward. It smelled quite dry, and not in the least musty. He opened another door, and guided them into pitch darkness. Lydia, recalling her visit to the copy of the cave and telling herself to expect a rather less impressive sight of slightly faded paintings, despite the undeniable thrill of the original, braced herself for a mild disappointment.
    Then the director threw a switch, and a long, deep chamber, perhaps fifty yards long and ten yards wide, flooded with a cold, bright halogen light. Lydia heard the others gasp, and Manners cry out and protectively clutch her arm, as a great herd seemed almost to leap upon them.
    Bulls, she thought. Giants from another age. The great bulls of Lascaux, on each side of her, rising. No, towering into the ceiling, and given depth and mass by the other beasts around them. She saw horses and great deer with monstrous antlers, and then what seemed almost a unicorn. My God, she thought, all sense of fear gone, her instant reaction of alarm replaced by a sense of