The Gravity of Years
Almost a thousand feet into the meandering cave, our guide stopped and with a slight flourish, angled her light against the wall.
“You see it?”
It was unmistakable – the arc of the horse’s back, the fluid line of its head, the stubby mane like an upturned toothbrush. Etched into the rock with bold assurance, the bulge of the wall was used to animate the artist’s vision.
We were at Les Combarelles, a cave in the Vézère valley of the French Dordogne, a region dotted with the traces of the pre-historic people who once made it home. Hunters and gatherers, living long before the first farms or the miracle of metal.
We’d snagged the last online tickets, and pulled up to park in a deserted, grassy spot with a modest signpost.
“Really? Is this it?” We had looked uncertainly up the slope to a small white house – and an iron door into the hillside.
“No photos allowed? Hardly worth bothering,” we’d laughed.
The house turned out to be a ticket office and tiny museum. There was no one else around, but our young guide waited carefully for the exact moment. “Maximum is seven, and you are six. Maybe someone else comes.” She apologized for her “poor English,” which effortlessly surpassed our dusty high school French.
Our time arrived, and we followed her up the gentle slope. She unlocked and swung open the heavy metal door. It felt like an entry to the underworld – maybe not so fanciful, as it turned out.
As we walked, her flashlight began to reveal the cave menagerie, emerging like ghosts from the shadows.
“These are just a few, you understand. We have over six hundred.”
There were more horses, alone and in herds. Bison, mammoths, and a spectacular cave lion, its head and forequarters finely etched, while its rear half faded away, lost by time or its creator’s choice. A reindeer was drawn as if drinking water from the river that sculpted the cave over millennia. Not stylized symbols, but natural creatures, etched by artists who knew their subjects intimately. They were joined by mysterious shapes, and a few enigmatic humanoid figures. Traces of dye suggested the color that once brightened the incised lines.
To enable visiting, the cave floor had been lowered significantly, but we still stooped as we followed her through the dimly lit passageways. We had to move swiftly; time in the cave was limited lest our breath damage the fragile limestone. The urge to connect with the artist by touching and tracing the designs was almost irresistible.
“I am a beast! I will punish you if you do,” she laughed. She was serious though, as she should have been.
Occasionally, our guide crouched in the darkness and shone her light upwards.
“This is how they saw the etchings as they made them. From below, by the glow of tallow lamps.”
Entranced, we watched the figures springing to life.
For our little group, it had been fifty years since most of us finished college together in England. We lived on different continents; we lived different lives. There had been marriages, children, grandchildren, deaths. Dreams realized and dashed; a coming to terms with mortality. We had met again to relive the past and savor the splendors of the region, fought over for centuries by the English and the French. We explored towering castles, where old enmities played out in the interpretation – was our revered Richard the Lionheart really a rampaging invader who ravished the countryside? We canoed the gentle Dordogne River and walked in manicured gardens. In the evening, we laughed, played old music, drank wine, and reminisced, wondering where five decades had vanished.
And when we visited Combarelles, we came to understand what a flicker of time was: fifty years – or one hundred, or one thousand. Known to archaeologists as Magdalenians, the people who engraved the animals into the cave walls lived some fourteen thousand years ago. Grasping the enormity was hard; thinking of a thousand years – not long before the Lionheart rode into France, centuries before Columbus left Spain. Or two thousand years – when if he existed, Jesus of Nazareth roamed by the Sea of Galilee. Or forty-five hundred years ago, when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. By then, the Combarelles carvers had been dead for more than ten thousand years.
Our guide lingered after we stepped out of the cave and into the sunlight. She enjoyed practicing English, and it was a beautiful day. We learned that Combarelles, officially “discovered” in 1901, “lit a firecracker in the world of prehistory,” according to the French priest/archaeologist Abbé Breuil. Its artists exploded a smug narrative about the “primitive” people whose stone tools and animal bones littered the shallow caves and crannies of the landscape. Brutes, who scraped their living from the land, without the time or wit for artistic endeavor. Their creations offered a mute rebuke to Victorian arrogance. Forty years later, the myth of “savagery” was finally shattered by the discovery of the breathtaking, multicolor galleries at nearby Lascaux, soon closed to the casual visitor.
Why would men crawl deep into the hillside to create carvings and paintings that few would ever see? Our guide declined to offer an interpretation, while acknowledging how many scholars have ventured one.
“Imagine for yourselves!”
And so we did. How could we be sure they were men? Women were artists too. But the caves depicted only large animals – the deer, mammoths, horses, and bison that were almost certainly hunted by men. Or dangerous predators like lions or bears, who competed with the hunters. No rabbits, squirrels, birds – the everyday creatures that women traditionally caught for the cooking fire. Big game hunting was dangerous work, especially with spears and arrows. It was doubtful the spirit of a weasel struck awe in a warrior, but tackling a mammoth surely called for divine intervention.
Theories abounded, and we shared them as we gazed across the valley. Were the pictures made to capture the spirit of the animal and bring luck in hunting? Were they totemic emblems, speaking of clan and kindred? Or by crawling deep into the hidden underworld, were the artists entreating the gods to bring them home safely and feed their families? From the ancient Greeks to the Mayans, myths told of people moving back and forth between the current world and the world below. As we traced the painstaking path of the artists, it made sense to me. But we’d never know for sure.
Later, with a visit to the Museum of Prehistory in nearby Les-Eyzies, we marveled at more Magdalenian creations. The astonishing artifacts, retrieved from everyday living spaces, included lintels carved with horses and even salmon. Some were tiny and touched the heart, such as the four-inch figure of an extinct bison, engraved in exquisite detail on a broken spear thrower. Its finely etched head was turned around, its tongue extended to lick its flank. I liked to think a woman worked on it by her fireside. Why not?
Our encounter with the Magdalenians offered a moment to contemplate the incomprehensible passing of time. We grappled with both the gulf that separated their world from ours, and the artistic vision that testified to our common humanity.
It was not my first time in the ancient world. Decades before, I had my first brief encounter with the enigmatic ancestors. It was years before meeting the lanky geography student who became my partner in life and travel. I was with my family, in the days when summer meant packing six into our 1960s Volkswagen van and heading across the English Channel. On one such trip we visited another cave gallery — not Combarelles, but its neighbor, Font Du Gaume. We marveled at the artists’ genius, and perhaps my parents sensed the gravity of years as we walked the tunnels. But at fourteen, I saw things differently, and there was neither time nor inclination to contemplate. The future was infinite, and anything was possible.
The twilight of a cave felt different when I returned. Among the wine and laughter, we knew there was darkness not too far ahead. In fifty or sixty years, who would be left to remember us? And in fifteen thousand years, would any trace of our world remain for our descendants to ponder?
© Elizabeth Bird
A retired anthropology professor, Elizabeth Bird has published seven books, most recently Surviving Biafra: A Nigerwife’s Story, with Rosina Umelo (Hurst, 2018). Her work appears in Under the Sun (winner, Readers’ Choice Award 2022), Tangled Locks, Biostories, Streetlight, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, HerStry, The Guardian, Mutha Magazine, 3Elements Review, Heimat Review, Witcraft, and elsewhere. Her essay “Interlude: 1941,” was named a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. Her website is: www.lizbirdwrites.com.
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