The Oldest Enigma of Humanity by Bertrand David

Author:Bertrand David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

XV

Everything seemed to be coming together; with the existence of the statues now firmly established, my idea didn’t seem so crazy anymore. If it could hold weight as a rational hypothesis, it was time to test it.

Of course, I had no way of getting my hands on a prehistoric statue. I would have to use my imagination and do the best with whatever I could find. A hunting trip to a toy store was all I needed to assemble a small game park. Some of these plastic and rubber figurines demonstrated an admirable likeness, while others were simpler, less detailed. In order to have the largest variety of sizes at my disposal, I even located some flat, plywood cut-outs of horses.

With a wide selection of figurines at my disposal, the next all-important question was lighting. It probably doesn’t occur to anyone studying the paintings in the pages of a photo album that those marvelous images would not be possible without electricity. However, what the Paleolithic artists could see of their own work and of the surrounding caves is vastly different than what we can see with the help of modern lighting. In fact, the drawings can really only be appreciated in the belly of the caves themselves, in places that are very difficult to illuminate and that can only be reached after a long journey through sinuously winding corridors. It’s here that prehistoric man created them, in galleries so plunged in darkness that it is almost impossible to see more than a single painting at a time.

A torch gives off a vacillating light, whose incessant waverings cannot be replicated by electric lighting. If I was going to recreate anything like the actual conditions in which the paintings were made, it was out of the question to use a modern light source. Mammoth oil being in short supply these days, I knew I would have to find an oil lamp of some kind. Several had been discovered in the caves, even at Lascaux, which had turned up one of the most famous and beautiful specimens: an oil burner in pink sandstone.

I won’t go into great detail about my quest to find a proper oil lamp and the right kind of fuel for it. What I will say is that, while oil lamps are still sold, can often be pretty, and are even rather expensive at times, they don’t give off much light. After several disappointing attempts, a family heirloom was pressed into service: a very old clay lamp that fairly resembled the kind of burners used in Antiquity, and that my parents had received as a gift from a friend who had brought it back from a North African desert. Its exact age was unknown, but it was evidently very old and it had been left to me after my parents’ death. I removed it from its display case and carefully filled it with oil, rolling a tuft of cotton from the bathroom into a wick. Although it hadn’t been used for centuries, the old lamp glowed again.

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