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By Root 967 0

century, the land had been cultivated with grapevines, but when the vines were killed by phylloxera, local farmers dug them up and planted the area in pines. When one of the trees toppled over early in the twentieth century, it revealed an opening in the ground about the size of the entrance to a fox's den, which the farmers blocked off to protect their cattle from possible injury. Legend has it that during Ravidat's walk, his dog fell into the hole, and when Ravidat scrambled to the dog's rescue, he noticed an opening to a deep shaft. He and some friends returned four days later. "I made myself a very rustic but quite adequate lamp from an old oil pump and a few meters of string," Ravidat recalled. "When we arrived at the hole I rolled some large stones into it and was surprised at the time they took to reach the bottom.... I set to work with my big knife ... to widen the hole so that we could get into it." After hours of digging, planning, and crawling, they arrived at the floor of the cave. "We raised the lamp to the height of the walls and saw in its flickering light several lines in various colours. Intrigued by these coloured lines, we set about meticulously exploring the walls and, to our great surprise, discovered several fair-sized animal figures there.... Encouraged by this success we began to go through the cave, moving from one discovery to the next. Our joy was indescribable."

In the following days, other boys came to explore the cave, as did the local schoolmaster and then local men and women. Within a few weeks, people from all over the region began to arrive—more than five hundred visitors in the span of one week. "Like a trail of gunpowder the rumor of our discovery had spread through the region," Ravidat said. Old women brought their own candles to see by. They walked over rough ground and climbed down the narrow entrance. The paintings then, seen by the light of rudimentary lamps and small open flames, must have appeared much as they had in the Pleistocene.

Scientists and archaeologists came as well and mapped the cave: Chamber, Hall, Gallery, Passageway, Apse, Shaft, and Nave. They named the paintings: Frieze of the Black Horses, Frieze of the Small Stags, Procession of Engraved Horses, Frieze of the Swimming Stags, Niche of the Felines. After the war, the number of visitors to Lascaux increased markedly, and in time a walkway was put in.

During the thousands of years that the Lascaux Cave had remained undiscovered, the temperature inside never rose above 59 degrees, and the humidity level stayed constant. When the cave was crowded with visitors, the temperature sometimes rose to nearly 90 degrees. In 1955 excess carbon dioxide, produced by the visitors' breath, caused the first noticeable signs of deterioration in the paintings. Water droplets began to appear on the walls, and as they trickled down, they erased the pigments on the backs and necks of the animals. In 1958, to mitigate this problem, an air-exchange machine was put in, but it also worked to scatter the pollen that came into the cave on the visitors' feet. As a result, algae—"green leprosy" it was called—began to ravage the paintings. The animals were disappearing "in a prairie" of algae, Ravidat recalled. Also apparent was the "white disease"—crystals of calcite encouraged by the increased levels of carbon dioxide, humidity, and temperature—which began to cloud the paintings. To protect them, the cave was closed to the public in 1963.

In 1981 Mario Ruspoli was asked by the French Ministry of Culture to make a cinematographic record of the Lascaux paintings. It took him years to complete his work, since he was allowed access to the cave for only twenty days a year, in March and April, when the cave was at its coldest. His crew could work for only two or three hours at a time so that the heat emanating from their bodies and their hand-held, 100-watt quartz lamps could dissipate. Just two of their lamps could raise the temperature by several degrees and also raise carbon dioxide and moisture levels. One human body gave off more