1 y a is,000 Ans y WILSON HARRIS Les Eyzies,
Dordogne.
OR perhaps 20,000. Or perhaps 25,000. The artists of that day did not date their pictures and the archaeologists of this day have not much better means for hitting the truth ithin a few thousand years than common man. Let it go at 15,000. ifteen thousand years is long enough ago for most of us, and five ten thousand more would affect our perceptions little. But let s get at once to Ravidat—just Ravidat, for I don't think he really ants a Monsieur before his name. Ravidat, still in his twenties, s some claim to be considered the most remarkable man in the orld, for it was to Ravidat that it fell, on a September day not uite ten years ago, when the Germans were in occupation of half ranee (still only half), to be the first human being for what we ave agreed to call no more than 15,000 years to set eyes on the stonishing series of paintings with which the men of that day domed the walls of the great grotto at Lascaux—and then vanished, eaving virtually no other trace of their existence. It is an experience yen to shake hands with Ravidat, a young, dark, quiet Frenchman, ho spends his time today showing visitors, most competently, the iracles he had discovered.
The story of. how it happened is fairly familiar. Ravidat and hree friends of a dog (the dog in the event the most important of II) were wandering on a high hill above the little Dordogne town f Montignac (whether on licit or illicit pursuits is not quite clear) hen the dog suddenly disappeared through a small hole which n uprooted tree had disclosed. The hole was large enough for the og but by no means large enough for Ravidat. But Ravidat had esolution, a strong knife and a strong affection fcir his dog, and he three between them carried him in the space of an hour or so ut of the world of aircraft (the Battle of Britain was being won t that moment with Hurricanes and Spitfires) and radar and ockets into the world of 15,000 years ago. He was not quite as tupefied as you might think, for wall-paintings in caves are no very reat rarity in this green and fertile Dordogne valley, where the iver Vezere flows leisurely between its low banks, removed by few yards or a few hundred from the great limestone cliffs under hose overhanging brows the men of fifteen millennia ago made heir primitive homes. All round this small village of Les Eyzies laimed rather expansively to be the " capital of prehistory "—are ound the tools and weapons and the pictures of these forgotten en who hunted bygone beasts up and down the two banks of he Vezere. Here the archaeologists of today turn their steps year y year, settling down at the Hotel des Glycines—Honeysuckle otel if you like that better—to hear of and examine and discuss nything that local search has brought to light since they were at es Eyzies last.
In the grottoes round Les Eyzies, as Ravidat knew, there are all-paintings (as at Font de Gaume), wall-engravings (as at Les ombarelles), wall-sculptures (as at Cap Blanc) all of them dating torn some period of the Stone Age—whether Aurignacian or olutrian or Magdalenian must be left for the archaeologists to etermine by a majority vote. The Les Eyzies discoveries go back me fifty years, and for forty they held the experts marvelling. hen Ravidat's dog Robot (dead, alas, Ravidat tells me) opened a oor to something that made them simply meaner beauties of the ight. For Lascaux, not at Les Eyzies but fifteen miles away at ontignac, is unique, eclipsing, I believe, even the remarkable Itamira cave in Northern Spain. The impression a first visit makes indescribable, even though of necessity all the commercial pparatus of entry must precede—billets 105 francs per personne, rochures, picture postcards and the rest. A normal descent down oncrete steps has been constructed, electric light has been carried nobtrusively through the winding galleries, but it needs Ravidat's owerful torch (or Marsal's ; Marsal was one of Ravidat's corn- an ions on the historic day) to pick out the detail and the colouring f the pictures.
And what a collection, in what a gallery. There is nothing ■ approaching a flat surface on any wall. The painter's implement— moss dipped in pigment, or pigment blown through a hollow bone, or simply his fingers—had to wander over excrescences and into crannies, and achieve on this incredibly hostile canvas the best approach to perspective that it could. I know no more of art than I do of archaeology. Lascaux could have admitted no more unsophisticated critic. But even on me the power and movement in these primeval quadrupeds—horses and bison, reindeer, antelope, cows, even a rhinoceros—impressed itself irresistibly. The colours, black, ochre and red, stand out as clear, to all appearance, as when the prehistoric artist applied them first to these concave and convex surfaces, where calcareous growths overlaying them have enabled the geologist to help the archaeologist to date them. All round the walls and on the roof you see them—two great bisons tail to tail, an aged deer with vast antlers, a frieze of horses, one vast Aurochs full six yards long, and in the lowest depth of all. where only the privileged may penetrate, that astonishing " prehistoric tragedy " —the wounded bison with entrails projecting, gored by a rhinoceros, and by him, dead and prostrate, the hunter he has killed. The hunter has a bird's head, said to be an emblem of deatu. Here doubtless is the earliest composition (as distinct from separate animals) in the world.
What story does it tell us, this Incomparable legacy of bygone man ? Not much that is obvious. Certainly it gives information, as plain and authentic as the middle page of The Times, about the beasts that a hundred and fifty centuries ago roamed these Dordogne valleys ; but most of that was known already from the fragmentary remains that have found their way to the local or the Paris museums. For the rest what is left is a series of unanswered, and for the most part unanswerable, questions. By what light did these prehistoric artists do their work ? The Lascaux cave is black as night ; when Ravidat followed his dog down the hole he lit his way with a box of matches. How did they reach the roof ? Has the floor subsided, or did they lower logs of wood through the entrance to raise them to the necessary level ? It is virtually certain that the Lt.scaux caves were never inhabited ; there would be abundant traces of humanity if they had been. Were they a centre of religion ? Or of magic ? Does the pregnant cow represent a prayer in picture for fertility ? Are the arrows planted in the bison's side a hunter's hope, analogous to the vindictive pins stuck through a wax image of your enemy ? Once more; who knows ? To some extent, perhaps, the archae- ologists ; but remember that Lascaux was only discovered in 1940 and no one from outside France could enter France (except in uniform) till 1945.
Most mysterious, perhaps, of all is the absence of all remains of the men and women who lived and died, as men and women of today still live and die, in this green valley of the Vezere. How they lived—in caves, or in rough shelters under the great overhangs of rock so characteristic of this region—is known. Remains of their tools and weapons and utensils have been found in abundance, but of the human beings who fashioned the tools and used them hardly a stray bone. One or two fairly perfect skeletons found near Les Eyzies are extant, and one skull—the Cro-magnon—famous in anthropology was turned up in the middle of the village, where the hotel of that name now stands. But what did they do with their dead ? They had hardly tools capable of digging graves, and in any case skeletons of the buried would have been discovered long since. Did they burn them ? Wherever that has happened else- where charred bones have survived through the centuries. Of charred bones here not a trace. From the great deep to the great deep they went, the fate of their bodies no better ascertained than the fate of their souls.
Some there be that have left no memorial. But assuredly not the men of Lascaux. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen millennia before David or Homer lived here they were, a few miles from where my fountain-pen so smoothly marks the paper, mixing their strange, enduring pigments, plying their mysterious art, leaving on the rock's corrugated and uncongenial surface signatures—the only signatures, for they knew no writing—that we gaze at uncomprehendingly today. The door into pre-history is opened half an inch. Who knows if it will ever_ be opened wider ?
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