The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

cave—there is only one, among some six hundred paintings and fifteen hundred engravings. And it is not even clear that it is meant to be a reindeer. That is why we doubt that there was a hunting ritual here, picturing the beasts they intended to hunt. Some scholars think that this painting was a work of the winter, when there was little else to do in the long nights. But they did not live in the caves, and from the tent sites we have found, there are signs that they were migrants, traveling with the reindeer herds. Allowing for the lack of domesticated animals and agriculture, they lived a little like the Evenk tribes of Siberia, a little like the Indians of North America.”
    “Perhaps we should move on to the Nave,” said the director. “Back down this Axial Gallery, and through the narrow passage to your left. You now will see treasures that are unique. These parts of the cave have not been copied for the tourist exhibit. These can be seen only here, in the place where they were made. You will see on the ceiling above a mass of horses engraved into the rock. And now farther, into what we call the Nave. To your left, the famous panel of the black cow. And look beneath its rear feet, the checkerboards of black and red and yellow squares. Another mystery.”
    Lydia could feel Clothilde fuming behind her, and reached back to squeeze her hand in solidarity. Dismayed that the joyful mood that gripped their small party in the Hall of the Bulls should now have become icy, she wondered why Malrand had reacted so furiously. He was probably sick and tired of people constantly asking him for favors. But there had been a distinctly personal note in his curt silencing of Clothilde, almost as if the two of them had been involved at some time in the past. Hmm, there was a thought. But surely a presidential mistress, even if the affair were long in the past, would know better than to appeal to him in public? No, Malrand said she had tried the same gambit in the car. Perhaps that was Clothilde’s point, to get some kind of public commitment.
    “Behind us is my own favorite,” said Malrand, his voice normal, his mood apparently equable again. “Am I right, Monsieur le Directeur, that we now see the swimming stags?”
    “Indeed so, Monsieur le Président. A great work, its scale matched by its ambition.” The five stags’ heads stretched almost the full remaining length of the cavern, twelve or fifteen feet. Their antlers were far less ornate than those in the Hall of the Bulls, but somehow more real, emerging from a darker outcropping of rock that seemed to represent a river. Each stag’s head was cocked at a different angle, giving movement and continuity almost like a strip cartoon.
    “How far does this cavern stretch back?” asked Manners.
    “The Nave behind you goes on, ever narrower, and then dropping sharply, for some fifty meters, into a small chamber we call the Hall of the Cats, but they are very hard to see and it is not easy to reach. Down this way, we drop into what we call the pits, and then down a steep drop of stones into a kind of well, probably scooped out by swirling waters from the times when this was the course of an underground stream. It goes on another twenty meters or so, through a gap too narrow for anyone but a devoted cave explorer. But if we are careful here as we descend, we come to something quite unique.”
    He played his light into a small gallery, picking out to their right the unfinished drawing of a horse; he swiveled the torch to the left, to the outline of a beast like a rhinoceros. Then he brought the light back toward them, and Manners reacted as if he had been punched.
    “My God, it’s a killing!”
    “More than that, a combat,” said Malrand. “Which leaves both participants dead.”
    A crude drawing of a man, almost a stick figure, lay on the ground, arms outstretched. His head had either been very crudely drawn, or had been given a long, birdlike beak. His penis was erect, and in the shape of a spike. Below him lay a stick with a bird perched on one end. Towering over the fallen men was a great bison, some four feet long, its horns aiming down to gore at its victim. But a stick, perhaps a spear, was in the doomed beast’s belly, and its entrails spilled in great loops on the ground.
    “There are many theories about this, but only some elements I think we can be sure of,” said the director. “That stick with the bird on top seems to me to be a decoy. A hunter could