The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [154]
The area of the Fifth Cave suddenly made her think of the Third Cave at Two Rivers Rock and Reflection Rock of the Twenty-ninth Cave. Their living areas were spread out on residential terraces, one over another, in commanding walls of cliffs, with protective overhangs to shelter the interior spaces from rain and snow. Here, instead, there were several shelters closer to ground level on both sides of the small stream. But it was the close proximity of the several locations where people lived that made them one Cave. Then it occurred to her that the entire Twenty-ninth Cave was attempting to do the same thing, except that their living places were more widely dispersed. It was their mutual hunting and foraging area that brought them together.
“Greetings!” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said when they neared. “I hope you find your place comfortable. We are going to have a community feast in your honor.”
“It isn’t necessary to go to so much trouble,” the One Who Was First said.
He looked at the First. “You know how it is; people love to have an excuse for a celebration. Your coming is a particularly good excuse. We don’t often have the Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave who is also the One Who Is First as a visitor. Come inside. You said you wanted to show your acolyte our Sacred Places.” He turned to address Ayla. “We live in ours,” he said, as he led them in.
The inside of the stone shelter made Ayla stop short with surprise. It was so colorful. Several of the walls were decorated with paintings of animals, which was not so unusual, but the background of many of them was painted a bright red shade with red ocher. And the renderings of the animals were more than outlines, or drawings; most of them were infilled with color, shaded to bring out the contours and shapes. One wall in particular caught Ayla’s attention. It was a painting of two exquisitely portrayed bison, one of them obviously pregnant.
“I know most people carve or paint the walls of their abris, and may consider the images sacred, but we think of this entire space as sacred,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said.
Jondalar had visited the Fifth Cave several times and had admired the wall paintings of their stone shelters, but he had never thought of them any differently than he did the paintings and engravings inside the shelter of the Ninth Cave, or any other cave or abri. He wasn’t sure if he understood why this shelter should be any more sacred than any other, though it was more highly colored and decorated than most. He just assumed that it was the style that the Fifth Cave preferred, like the ornate tattoos and hair arrangement of their Zelandoni.
The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave looked at Ayla with the wolf standing alertly at her side, then at Jondalar and the baby, who was tucked contentedly into the crook of the man’s arm, looking around with interest, then at the First. “Since the feast is not yet ready, let me show you around,” he said.
“Yes, that would be nice,” the First said.
They walked out of the shelter and into another one that was immediately to the north. It was essentially a continuation of the first one. And it was also decorated, but in a very different way, which created the sense that they were two different shelters. There were paintings on the walls, like the mammoth that was painted in red and black, but some walls of this cave were deeply engraved and some were both engraved and painted. Other engravings intrigued Ayla. She wasn’t sure what they meant.
She approached a wall to look more closely. There were some cup-like holes, but other oval carvings with a second oval around them and a mark like a hole extended into