Il était avec son chien.

Sixty-eight years ago on this date, a dog fell in a hole. In France. The dog's name was Robot.

You guys know that I'm a cat person, but it's a good thing Robot's master wasn't, since a cat would likely have noticed the hole and gone around it. But Robot, probably galumphing along after a rabbit or something, tongue trailing like Isadora Duncan's scarf, did not notice the hole. He plunged straight down and couldn't get out again.

To rescue the pup, Robot's master and his three friends clambered down into the hole, which turned out to be a cave, and a rather large one at that. It also turned out that les quatre garçons were not the first humans to have visited the cave. Some seventeen millennia prior, a number of highly skilled Cro-Magnon artists had covered its walls and ceiling with thousands of paintings of animals, for reasons that are still being debated.

The reasons, while they'd be nice to know, aren't important ultimately. What's important is that the Lascaux cave paintings are among the first expressions of the human spirit through the medium of art. They're also breathtakingly beautiful.

Horsie!

I've been fascinated by cave paintings ever since I took a two-semester survey of art history during my first year of college. (That course, by the way, remains one of my favorite educational investments. I love the fact that I can identify a Modigliani on sight, or point out the differences between Gothic and Romanesque architecture, or discuss the significance of the archaic smile. I love even more the fact that those things have actually come up in recent conversations.) When C.* and I went to France in 1996, one of the things I most wanted to do was see some actual cave paintings. Lascaux itself has long been closed to the general public, after it was discovered that the build-up of carbon monoxide from the exhalations of thousands of visitors was causing the paintings to fade. (And apparently there's a now a serious threat from fungi--see here. I haven't had time to peruse that site yet, but I definitely plan to. If there's anything we can do, we need to do it.) A replica cave was built down the road from the actual site, and it's supposed to be quite popular, but...if it ain't the real thing, I'm just not interested.

Anyway, I learned of another site near Les Eyzies (and if you're not in a random-link-following mood, the Les Eyzies tourist office would like you to know that it "proposes you to discover its local gastronomy" and "its lodgings of quality in hotels, campings and lodgings") that is not nearly as spectacular as Lascaux, but does offer the chance to view some actual Paleolithic paintings and carvings.

Well, to make a long story short, manipulating the French rail system to get where we wanted to go and do what we wanted to do in the time we had allotted proved too daunting a task. We ended up in a town about 10 km away from Les Eyzies called Sarlat. It has a gorgeous medieval center and great food (Southwest France being the truffle capital of the world, everything had shaved truffles on it--yum), and we stayed in the home of une très gentille dame who spoke no English, which meant I actually got to use my French.

The market square in Sarlat. Seriously.

On our one full day there, we decided to head out to the Dordogne River, some 5 km south, where we'd heard we could rent a canoe. We'd planned to just walk there, but once we got out on the road we realized how extraordinarily hot it was, and decided to hitch a ride instead. I remember almost nothing about the guy who picked us up or his car, because he proceeded to drive at such breakneck speeds that I was unable to unglue my eyes from the road that I was certain we were all about to be splattered upon. I do remember asking, in a vague attempt to engage him in conversation and perhaps get him to slow down, "Alors, est-ce qu'il fait toujours aussi chaud qu'il fait aujourd'hui?" or, roughly, "So, is it always this fucking hot?" His reply, in toto: "Non." Fortunately it was a short ride.

We got to the river in one piece, and got our canoe. There were several other parties who set out at the same time, but as everyone set their own pace we all drifted further from one another, and soon C. and I had the river to ourselves. The water was placid, the scenery was beautiful, the sky was cloudless, and the sun was...hot. I mentioned before that it was really hot, right? Well, now that it was midday and we were out on the water with no shade of any kind, it was really really hot. We started to talk about going for a dip in the river. But as the town where we'd started out fell behind, sheer cliffs began to rise on either side of us, and there was no longer any riverbank where we might beach our canoe. Also, we hadn't had the foresight to bring our bathing suits.

Not us, nor the actual spot. But you get the idea.

Then we rounded a bend, and saw a tiny half-moon of sand and gravel at the base of the cliffs on our right. Up ahead, as behind us, the river curved out of sight. We'd found our spot. We beached the boat, and quickly stripped off our clothes and plunged in. Can you believe that, until that point, I'd never been skinny-dipping before? And the sun was so hot, and that water was soooo deliciously cold, that even though I must've swum in scores of different rivers in my life, not to mention various other bodies of water, I can still remember how that particular water felt against my skin.

At first we were laughing and splashing around, as you do when you're naked in a river. But soon, for reasons neither of us did or could articulate, we fell silent. In fact, it seemed as if the whole world fell silent, except for the soft murmur of the river.

I looked up at the cliffs surrounding us and noticed for the first time that they were pockmarked with small caves. Was it possible, I wondered, that those caves had been used by the Paleolithic humans who'd flourished here so many thousands of years ago? Would they even have been able to reach them? How different was the landscape then, with Europe still emerging from an ice age? It didn't really matter. But for our canoe and our clothes, discarded behind us on the tiny beach, there was nothing of the modern world about. And we, naked under the summer sun, were no different than those who might have laughed and splashed there millennia before. I began to feel a presence in that gorge, as though the benevolent spirits of the long-vanished Magdalenians who had called this land home were looking down upon us from those ancient cliffs. Some of them could conceivably have been my ancestors, but even if they weren't they were my human sisters and brothers, connected to me across time by the same desires and curiosities we all experience. I feel like we generally imagine Paleolithic life to have been harsh, but the abstract of that Britannica article I just linked to indicates that the Magadalenians "lived a semisettled life surrounded by abundant food" and had leisure time in which to create their art, so the calm benevolence of their spirits doesn't seem strange.

It was an incredibly powerful and very real sensation, and I knew that we were both feeling it. We didn't speak for several minutes. We were spellbound.

Finally, the sound of voices from around the bend broke the spell. A canoe came into sight, its occupants chattering loudly. We crouched down to hide our bodies and, after the boat had passed, realized we'd better be getting on so we didn't arrive at the end of the course late and miss our ride back to the starting point.

I'd still like to get back and see the cave paintings at some point. But if I had to miss them, it was worth it for the experience I had on the river that day.


*From time to time there are people I need to talk about on this blog, but either I don't want to mention their names, or I worry that they might not want me to mention their names. So I've decided to do the coy initial thing.