I spent a very bad night of very little sleep, the small family hotel’s desk long since closed, remembering the guidebook’s warning that hotel rooms in Sarlat are hard to get, etc., etc. I would turn the light back on and search for a bus station—no. I remembered our afternoon guide mentioning there was an airport at Bergerac—how many towns toward Bordeaux was that, again? Could I take a taxi there (and at what insane cost)? What to do, what to do? Was I going to wind up sleeping in some doorway?
As soon as the reception area opened Sunday morning I was there. Miraculously, my room was available another night (the waning of peak season saved me). Back up to my garret, where I had an internet connection long enough to come THIS close to buying the ticket I needed, only to have the SNCF website reject not one, not two, but THREE American credit cards (including one I didn’t even have on me, but remembered the number of). I called the hotel in Toulouse and canceled one night.
I had to go rendezvous, still twisting slowly in the wind, with the group for the day tour. 9:00 A.M., same little square, by now familiar.
We drove first, through gorgeous countryside, to Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil (these places wind up with these long hyphenated names when multiple little villages and communes join to share administration; this one seems to get called simply Les Eyzies for short) and the National Museum of Prehistory. It’s a beautiful, modern museum, very well curated and thought out (past the reception area, you enter via a pathway that’s a replica of a cast of the Paleolithic footprints of an adult and two children)—and the collections are magnificent. We of course couldn’t spend the hours there one definitely could, but our excellent guide took us through high points, talking at length about various finds and artifacts and their significance.
From there we drove to the cave of Rouffignac. Our guide had said she liked for people to visit it before Lascaux, brilliant and perfect replica though it is, to get the feel of “cave art” in situ, and be able to bear that sensory experience in mind when viewing the replica. Rouffignac is the largest cave complex in the Périgord, over eight kilometers. A tiny train takes visitors into the winding passageways of the underground river that formed the tunnels over millions of years. Visits are restricted to a certain small number a day. Unlike even the original of Lascaux, though, that was sealed for many millennia by a rockslide and then clay, a little damp has been able to penetrate Rouffignac, with the result that, very slowly but inexorably, calcite formation is gradually obliterating some of the art.
So we rode, and rode, slowly into the tunnel. It was very dark, with only the flashlight of the complex’s guide, a middle-aged man clearly passionate about his task (and who our tour guide, who stayed outside for the duration, said has been doing the same job for twenty-seven years) for light. When he turned it off for—illumination would be the opposite of the correct word, except in the mental sense, we experienced absolute darkness. Even with the relative comforts and reassurances of modern technology, it is a sobering, profound experience: to be there, to grasp that our ancestors walked in there for unknown reasons, with the most primitive of tools and iffy of lights (small scooped-out stone bowls of fat, with juniper wicks, each of which might burn for a couple of hours at the very most), and produced—well. Nothing for about a kilometer, and then he shone his light on a frieze of beautiful, perfect two-horned, shaggy rhinoceroses in a row. My eyes filled with tears. It is the most moving, overwhelming sensation, the connection over tens of thousands of years, the beauty of what they made there. I have a friend, who drove me to the airport before leaving, who said he’s ruffled other, artist friends’ feathers by saying there has been nothing truly new in art since the cave paintings—and yet I could see the truth of it, here and even more, later, at Lascaux.
Deeper, far deeper in, past other friezes and drawings, we stopped and got out for the only time, in a small round “room.” There are drawings all over the walls and ceiling, that he illuminated one by one for us. Then, having, unnoticed, reversed all the seat backs in the little train (as New Orleans streetcar drivers do), he started us back toward the entrance. We repassed another feature of the cave, a vast number of “nests” of the cave bears who had hibernated there over millennia before humans showed up. These are enormous, hollowed out areas. In places on the walls are the marks of their huge claws.
Once we emerged, dazed, into the sunlight once again (in my deep preoccupation with other, present-day worries, I hadn’t even thought to bring a jacket. It had been very warm the previous afternoon, hot with all our climbing and descending, and it hadn’t registered how chilly it would be in a cave. Our guide had lent me her long scarf and a woman from California, an extra padded vest she had, and they were barely enough to keep me from chattering teeth—strange, when the cave guide told us the cave maintains a constant temperature of, I think he said, 53 degrees Fahrenheit), we headed off to lunch in Les Eyzies. A very good lunch, in fact, though extremely rushed because we had a scheduled time to be at Lascaux (because there are only so many tours in English).
And then, after more driving (conscious, now, of how alien this very landscape would have been in the last Ice Age: not forests and farms, but short grasses or low, rough tundra, summers of two or three months, maybe an occasional tree where the ice had not extended), there was Lascaux. The actual cave has been closed to the general public since 1963, its location kept as secret as possible. A replica was created early on, a recreation by artists. This was known as Lascaux II. A Lascaux III is a traveling exhibit. Now, in a stunning, state-of-the-art facility—museum, workshops, research facility, and replica—there is Lascaux IV, a digitally perfect recreation: size, shape, colors, configuration. Our guide here was a young man with (I asked our tour guide later) a degree in history that incorporated prehistory. His passion for his subject made even that of the Rouffignac guide’s dim.
You walk through. The space is much, much smaller than Rouffignac; in places it’s a tight squeeze. At the beginning, they’ve even replicated the opening as it was first found in the 1940s, with its rock slide, its 20,000-year clay seal. The paintings—for here they are, not just elegant line drawings, but fully colored in, brilliant paintings—burst into being before you, make your heart stop. These people lived alongside these animals, knew them intimately, in a time when we were just another species trying to survive, not one so dominant it had the ability to destroy the world. There are two bison fighting, likely in rutting season, when they would have half shed their winter coats—and there they are, the browner summer coat showing through the shaggier, darker winter one, the bison thumping up against each other side to side, rump to rump. There are aurochs and mammoths and horses (shaggy little horses, like modern Shetland ponies, as our guide pointed out: not so lost or incomprehensible at all), in closely-observed detail: running, fighting, overlapping naturally, their legs juxtaposed.
And yet: there is more, much more, going on here. Matisse is everywhere, in the brilliant capturing of creatures with a few lines, in the saturated, brilliant colors. There are symbols, literal repeated symbols beyond just the why, the unknown purposes, for which we now have no key to understanding. There are the paintings deep in the cave (or “cave”), half hidden, that must mean something else because of that—were only certain people supposed to view them? There is an area literally covered with etched figures, hundreds of them. It’s speculated that this perhaps was a dedicated place where everyone, not just a select, talented few, was allowed to create. This area leads, though, to an incredible space (that we couldn’t get closer to) where, through an opening, you can see art all over a wall beyond, that is the wall of an abyss, like a deep well. Someone, for surely some deep purpose lost to us, went there and, in such an extremely dangerous position, created art.
And there is, set apart from all the teeming other animals, a creature that is no known, recognizable creature, but a composite of at least three. It is not colored in. The staff at Lascaux refer to it as “the unicorn” (though it in fact has two horns). When you pass through a sort of right angle in the cave, and walk down a bit, if you turn to look back there is an opening behind you. Through it you can see only this creature, in the passage you left behind. Was it to guide you back out? What did it mean?
I am hard-pressed to remember any time when I was so moved, so utterly awed, as on this day, in these caves.
Back in the present-day world, when we arrived back at the little square in Sarlat, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of returning to the hotel, finding a place to sit leisurely with a coffee and perhaps pastry. No, I had resolved that what I had to do was go in person to the train station and buy a ticket for Tuesday morning. The only problem was, WHERE was the station? My arrival and taxi ride were a blur. I knew the general direction, but not precisely how to get there. In our wonderful guide’s perhaps one lapse, she mentioned airily “a footpath” at the railroad viaduct I’d walked almost to when I missed the rendezvous point the morning before. Armed only with that—because it must be easy, or there would be more to it—I set off, sleepless and already tired.
I walked and walked. I reached the viaduct. I saw no footpath, or not that appeared to lead to anything. So, I must have misconstrued, and it must be past the viaduct. I walked, and walked. This was turning into my misadventure of the previous year, in Vouvray, that had caused injury. I was out where the street was becoming a highway, and still no sign. This couldn’t be right. I walked. Finally, increasingly limping and disgusted, not to mention frantic, I turned around. There was a little sort of strip mall, where one bar was open, and a young man out front with a couple of children. I crossed over and asked him. He said yes, just past the viaduct, there was a path.
Okay. I hiked back, crossed under the viaduct, and there was—this must be what they were talking about, a sidewalk, some steps that went down, more sidewalk. I followed all this, hoping I didn’t have to climb back UP any stairs at this point. But I did, at the end of this—and (insert many swear words), I was back where I’d started, somehow, right beside the damned viaduct. I was torn between my exhaustion and fear of once again missing having a ticket. I teetered there, starting back on the long walk to the hotel, but veering into the parking lot/terrace of some little café where there were chronically people sitting outside drinking and playing—cards, checkers. HERE, a man pointed, not in the direction of the viaduct, but across the street and up a hill. THERE was the path I needed.
So I crossed over (almost literally, by then). Slowly, because it was a steep hill, past more little strip mallish stores and cafés, stopping a few times to catch my breath, I made my way up the paved walk under overhanging branches. Finally, finally, an hour after I’d set out, there was the small station. Which was—you know this as well as I do—closed.
There, on the side of the station, were posted the numbers of a few taxi—companies. Individuals, whatever. The first one I called didn’t answer. The second did, and within a few minutes a taxi actually arrived (Sarlat has a problem: the taxi people really, obviously do not like to drive anyone just from the train station to the medieval quarter. I lucked out twice). With massive relief, I climbed in and gave him my destination (which, bizarrely—Sarlat is a town of about 10,000, with a huge tourist trade—he professed never to have heard of). Almost immediately, though after we’d started on our way, I realized I didn’t have my prescription sunglasses. I’d kept them on or with me for two intensive days of in and out, off and on, and tightly clenched in my hand when I wasn’t wearing them this past hour. Now, like the camera, they were gone.
In the end, I walked back to the train station the next morning (and back into town. I was very stiff and sore). I bought a ticket. I inquired as to whether anyone had found a pair of glasses (which could be of no use to anyone but me): non, désolé (“et moi aussi,” I responded). I’d gotten up with a sore throat. By that evening it was a full-blown cold, and the night was a sleepless one again. Sitting outside in a chilly wind (Mondays the merchants and restaurateurs, many of them, apparently recuperate from the weekend) to have some lunch probably didn’t help.
The day after, Tuesday, I got up in the dark, ate my croissant, finished packing, and heaved my bag down all the narrow flights of stairs (on one, the minute light went out halfway down. They were motion-sensitive, but I wasn’t close enough to either one to trigger it. I finally just, in the cavelike darkness, let go of my bag and let it tumble to the next landing, then felt my way down, unencumbered). Oh, to be a unicorn.
The hotel owner met me outside the quarter to drive me to the station in the dark, a generous (paid) arrangement after a cab company I’d called abruptly informed me they would have no cars available, once I told them my location). At a little after 7:11, the train left Sarlat.
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