appeared, quite unexpectedly, while he sat opening his mail at his reading station, was a letter from the president of France.
Before he opened the important seal, for just a moment, Pierre abstracted the envelope into only its whiteness and then morphed it into a feather dropped from the tail of the Holy Spirit, who, Christians claimed, had appeared in the form of a dove.
So, what message had arrived from on high?
The president broached the idea that there should be a new unified ministry of prehistoric cave art and wondered if he, Pierre Saad, might consent to be its director, were such a ministry to be established. The president wrote that new technology, a device created to look under the surface of distant planets to see if inhabitants had fled underground, had been trained on the Dordogne Valley, the entire Aquitaine in fact, and the device meant to explore the nature of outer space had revealed many as yet undiscovered caves in the interior of the French earth. The caves gave evidence of having been visited by humans. The bones of animals, even of the extinct gigantic elk, megalasaurus, and huge cave bears, had been detected, and these bones had been cracked open and the marrow extracted as prehistoric humans had done.
For a moment Pierre paused in his reading of the president’s letter to try to imagine the kind of device that could detect bones deep in the passages under the earth, identify their species, and note their condition. He thought of Madame Curie and her colleagues, and their surprise that the new X-rays could see through skin and flesh to find the human skeleton.
No doubt many of the caves, showing evidence of having been visited in just the same ways that Font-de-Gaume, Pech Merle, Lascaux, Chauvet, and dozens of others had been visited, once hosted Neolithic humans. People had cooked meat to sustain them while they engraved the images of animals, or outlined their shapes on the rock, or suggestively painted their three-dimensionality in polychrome pigments onto ceilings and walls. Perhaps those caves that had been detected under the skin of France from outer space even predated Chauvet, with its polychrome animals more than thirty-five thousand years old.
Pierre Saad knew that the speculations of the president’s advisers were correct. His own house sat on top of such a cave. Intending only to establish a wine cellar like a good Frenchman, Pierre had accidentally broken into a deeper chamber. It was not that unusual. Rouffignac had also been discovered through a resident’s excavation of his own basement. That man had wanted to lower the floor so the basement could be better used for storage. Pierre’s eyes moved from the crisp, official paper—where did they buy such paper, unique in its importance?—to the expensive rug on his library floor.
Pierre wondered if the space eye had looked through his house as easily as it looked beyond the earth’s surface and if it had already mapped and numbered the corridors and rooms below him at that moment. Apparently the space eye could register geological aberrations and objects but not drawings; it could not detect the spectacular array of paintings he knew he harbored, though the eye would know of the scant animal bones scattered here and there. What the president wanted to know was whether there was art, galleries and galleries of it, in the numerous passages seen from outer space.
Pierre winced when he encountered the word galleries. Cave art had not been transported to galleries for sterile display. It had been created underground. The contours of the rocks sometimes dictated the type of animal or the posture of the animal who emerged from it.
“Knowing of your interest in these sacred texts …” the president had written.
Pierre Saad’s eyes lingered on the phrase “sacred texts.” Yes, that was what they were—all of the cave paintings. Even the hordes of tourists who had crowded into Lascaux II, the mere replica, to the extent that they had had to create Lascaux III and then Lascaux IV, replicas of replicas, knew that somehow they must get in vague touch with their origins as humans. In the beginning, what were people? When people had evolved to the point of knowing themselves as people, how did they think and feel? How did they treat one another? What knowledge did they seek when they turned to making art? What yearning sought satisfaction when they mixed their colors? How had the president known the exact phrase—the recognition that cave paintings were