The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [272]
They looked interesting and she wanted to go see them, but the Watcher led them around the left side of the large crater in the middle of the room toward another section of the cave. The left wall was hidden by a rocky mass of big blocks that she could barely make out in the light of the torches, which reminded her to knock off the excess burned ash from her torch. The light flared up and she realized that she would need to light another torch soon.
The Watcher began humming again as they approached another space defined by a much lower height. So low that someone had climbed up on the blocks and drawn a mammoth with a finger on the ceiling. On the right was the head of a bison, quickly done, followed by three mammoths, then several more drawings on rock pendants hanging from the ceiling. Ayla could see two big reindeer drawn in black and shaded to give them contours and, less detailed, a third one. On another part of the pendant, two black mammoths faced each other, but only the forequarters of the one on the left were made. The one on the right was filled in with black, and it had tusks—the only tusks she had seen on the mammoths in this cave. There were other drawings on pendants farther back, quite a distance above the floor: another mammoth engraved in left profile, a big lion, and then, surprisingly, a musk-ox identifiable by its down-curving horns.
Ayla had been so involved in trying to see the animals on the pendants in the back that it wasn’t until she heard the First join in that she realized the Watcher, the First, and the Zelandoni of the Nineteenth Cave were singing to the cave again. She didn’t join in this time. She could make bird and animal sounds, but she couldn’t sing. But she did enjoy listening.
She welcomed him back, Her lover of old,
With heartache and sorrow, Her story She told.
Her dear friend agreed to join in the fight,
To rescue her child from his perilous plight.
She told of Her grief. And the dark swirling thief.
The Mother was tired, She had to recover,
She loosened Her hold to Her luminous lover.
While She was sleeping, he fought the cold force,
And for a time drove it back to the source.
His spirit was strong. The encounter too long.
Her fair shining friend struggled hard, gave his best,
The conflict was bitter, the struggle hard pressed.
His vigilance waned as he closed his great eye,
Then darkness crept close, stole his light from the sky.
Her pale friend was tiring. His light was expiring.
When darkness was total, She woke with a cry.
The tenebrious void hid the light from the sky.
She joined in the conflict, was quick to defend,
And drove the dark shadow away from Her friend.
But the pale face of night. Let Her son out of sight.
Trapped by the whirlwind, Her bright fiery son,
Gave no warmth to the Earth, cold chaos had won.
The fertile green life was now ice and snow,
And a sharp piercing wind continued to blow.
The Earth was bereft. No green plants were left.
The Mother was weary, grieving and worn,
But She reached out again for the life She had borne.
She couldn’t give up, She needed to strive,
For the glorious light of Her son to survive.
She continued the fight. To bring back the light.
Suddenly something caught Ayla’s eye, something that made her shiver, and gave her a frisson of not exactly fear, but recognition. She saw a cave bear skull, by itself, on top of the horizontal surface of a rock. She wasn’t sure how the rock had found its way to the middle of the floor. There were a few other smaller rocks nearby and she assumed they had fallen from the ceiling, though none of the other rocks had a squared-off flat top surface, but she knew by what means the skull had found its place on the rock. Some human hand had put it there!
As she walked toward the rock, Ayla had sudden memories of the cave bear skull Creb had found with a bone forced through