The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [6]
Lydia took a dozen digital photographs of the rock, and weighed and measured it carefully before asking a janitor to take it up to her office. Then she sent e-mails and the digitalized photos to Professor Horst Vogelstern in Cologne and to the National Museum of Prehistory at les Eyzies in the Dordogne, in the heart of France’s cave region. It had been founded by Denis Peyrony, the French scholar who had first identified the frieze of the horses in the Font-de-Gaume cave, and ever since had been the main center for the study of early man. She marked the museum e-mail for the attention of Clothilde Daunier, a curator renowned for her encyclopedic knowledge of Lascaux and the surrounding caves. Lydia knew her only by reputation. She had heard of Horst as one of the leading authorities on prehistoric art even before she met him at a reception after he had given a lecture at the Courtauld Institute when she had been studying there. As a courtesy, she sent another e-mail to her old professor at the Ashmolean in Oxford. It was not his field, but she thought he might be interested. At least he could confirm that it was not African. She pondered sending more e-mails to some of her classmates who were still working in the field. There was a boring Irishman, now teaching in Australia, who had been interested in cave painting, and that insufferable Californian who had gone into paleoarchaeology. No, she thought firmly. No need to reopen those old connections. She pulled out Ann Sieveking’s The Cave Artists and André Leroi-Gourhan’s Dawn of European Art, and increasingly fascinated, she read until the night watchman found her just before ten. She climbed the stairs again to her small office, just to look at it once more. The night watchman followed her, a rather dear ex-serviceman with a carefully tended long white mustache.
“Should I put that in the storeroom for you, miss?” he asked. Then he looked at it. “That’s special, isn’t it?”
“I think it is, Mr. Woodley. I think it could be very special.” She smiled at him, feeling comfortable with the elderly man.
“Funny how you can always tell the real thing, the quality,” he said, turning her desk lamp to illuminate it more clearly. “Very old, is it?”
“Probably seventeen thousand years old, if my guess is right.”
“Crikey. Funny how you never think of art before the ancient Greeks. But it passes my test, miss.”
“What’s that, Mr. Woodley?”
“I get it now and again. First week I got this job, we had that Rembrandt in, and I got this shiver. I’ll never forget it. I’d never thought much about art before. Never seen much, I suppose. But I got it then, and I got it with that El Greco we had last year, and I’ve got it now.” He shook his head in solemn admiration. “Seventeen thousand years. Makes you think. I suppose that’s what makes us human, making art, just for the beauty of it.”
They looked at it together in silence, feeling the strength and nobility of a long-dead beast, and wondering about the mind and eyes and hands that had crafted it into something more potent than life. Those horns could kill, those haunches could breed, those legs could charge. Mr. Woodley was right to shiver, she thought. Less than two feet square, but it was an awesome beast. She felt a sense of sympathetic terror for whatever distant ancestors had gone up against it with spears and rocks and flint axes. In ennobling the bull, the artist had somehow ennobled the early men who had hunted it.
“You’re quite right, Mr. Woodley,” Lydia said quietly, thinking how foolish she had been that morning, to think of giving up a career that could give her moments such as this. “It’s what makes us human.”
“I’ll take care of it for you, miss. Put it in the storeroom overnight. You’d better get on home.”
She took the