The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

trees that overlooked a water hole. It was like this, all animals jostling together. Perhaps that is how it was then, a great tumult of life.”
    “I spent months as a student pursuing a theory I had,” said Clothilde. “I had been struck by the way this chamber reminded me of those maps the ancient Greeks made of the night sky, tracing the shapes of hunters and bears and beasts from star to star. I tried to make the beasts of the chamber fit the various models of the night sky over Péri gord seventeen thousand years ago. Each time I seemed to be on the brink of success in one section, another frustrated me. But I still have that feeling of being beneath a vast vault of stars.”
    “A tumult of life, you said, Monsieur le Président—but also of death,” intoned the director. “Look here, where we turn into the Axial Gallery—the falling horse. We are sure that it is falling, rather than simply being painted at this angle, when we look at the ears, the way they suggest the horse is tumbling backward. Perhaps this represents one of the ways they hunted, driving beasts over a cliff to fall to their deaths. And then here there is battle. See these two ibex, poised to hurl their horns against each other.”
    “What is that grid sign between them? asked Lydia. “Almost like a window with bars.”
    “Who knows, mademoiselle? There is much here we cannot comprehend. Perhaps the mark of an artist, perhaps some hieroglyph that had meaning to them, if not to us. Perhaps the indication of some kind of fence. They may not have domesticated their animals, as farming communities were to do ten thousand and more years in the future. But they may have used some kind of fence in their hunts.”
    One red beast, with a black face and neck that seemed slightly too small and even delicate for its bulk, caught Lydia’s attention. Bull or cow? She could not tell. It carried light and slender horns, sinuous yet lethal as rapiers, and its expression looked for a moment mean and angry, and then just bewildered.
    “This beast is extraordinary. It has character and expression—almost like a portrait,” she exclaimed.
    “I am so glad you said that,” said Clothilde. “That is my theory, that these were not just generic animals, a standard bull or horse, but individual representations. I have this wild hope—that hardly anyone shares—that one day we might find a portrait of a person. There are some rough caricatures of human faces that have been found at La Marche, but I have this feeling that artists such as these not only could have produced recognizable human faces, but would almost have been impelled to do so.”
    “Madame is known for the daring of her imagination,” said the director.
    “I’m full of wild theories, you mean,” laughed Clothilde.
    “Your President respects your intuition, and shares your hopes,” said Malrand.
    “Then my President will want to find the money to finance my research project to discover new caves,” retorted Clothilde. “With echo sounders and access to satellite mapping and help from the Air Force, we could identify caves all across this region. There may be more caves like Lascaux, perhaps even finer. Perhaps we could find portraits of the first French people. The Ministry of Culture supports it, but the project always dies in the Council of Ministers. If you were to adopt it as the Projet Malrand …
    “No politics, please, madame. I am taking a day off from affairs of state and budget battles,” said Malrand lightly.
    “But you are the only man in power who loves this art as I do, the only man who could make the difference,” she protested.
    “Madame, enough,” he snapped, in a tone so harsh and abrupt that Clothilde bowed her head and Lydia and Manners stared at the suddenly furious President. “I am not here to be badgered. You tried in the car and now you try again here. Just leave me in peace, if you please.”
    “These horses,” Lydia exclaimed, by trying to smooth over the sudden row. “They look like the horses of ancient Chinese pottery, the same coloring and proportions.”
    “We call them the Chinese horses,” said the director quickly, desperate to have his moment with the President unspoiled. “The parallels are striking—and horses are by far the most common animals here, four times more common than the cattle or the deer. But from the bones we found, they did not eat them. Reindeer was their main diet, and yet reindeer are very rare in the