The Painters of Lascaux by Lamplight

One late-summer day in the Vézère valley in south-west France, around seventeen thousand years ago, at the edge of the last Ice Age. A clear, cold river runs over the stones, pale limestone cliffs lean out over the grass, and under one of them a small band of people keeps a fire going while the light turns amber.

Along the way, a woman knapping flint into blades finer than anything you own, an old man sewing winter boots with a bone needle, a child sorting fossil shells carried from hundreds of kilometres away, red and yellow earth ground to powder on a stone palette, and a red sandstone lamp filled with fat and a twist of juniper. Then up the hill at dusk and into the cave we now call Lascaux: the great bulls, the yellow Chinese horse, the five stags that seem to be swimming, a scaffold for the ceiling, colour blown onto the rock like breath on a window, and the gentle puzzle of why the people who lived on reindeer almost never painted one.

The ending, given away now: the lamps burn low, the painters walk down under a sky full of stars, and the band sleeps close together by the banked fire while the river runs on below. The real cave rests today, kept dark and quiet, much as it lay for seventeen thousand years.

The first minute

Let the day come to an end now. You have done what there was to do. Whatever is left can wait until morning. It will keep. It always does. For now, there is only the bed, and the dark, and the long quiet hours ahead. Let your shoulders fall a little. Let your jaw go loose. Let your hands rest open, palms soft, fingers curled. Let your breathing slow down. Slow, and even, and in no hurry at all. Tonight we are going a very long way back. Around seventeen thousand years, perhaps a little more. We are going to…

Why this one works at night

It is one day, walked in order: the river, the camp, the flint, the needle, the shells, the colours, the lamp, the climb, the cave, the walk home. Every task in it is slow and done by hand, the kind of patient work that is restful to picture. The cave is the big event, and it is lit by a flame softer than a candle, so it arrives a little at a time, one animal coming out of the dark and going back into it. And the questions it leaves, what the signs mean and why the horses, are ones nobody can answer, so there is nothing to solve. Only something to wonder about, and then let go.

“…He goes on and on along the wall, beyond the edge of the lamplight—”

The kind of sentence people fall asleep during