On July 5 we woke feeling better — Diane wasn't completely well, but she said she was about 80 percent recovered, and didn't want to miss that day's planned expedition. So we piled into the car and headed east, following a rather zigzag route because the roads didn't want to go the way we did.
By midday we reached Cahors, a pleasant small city tucked into a loop of the Lot river. We had a good lunch at a sidewalk cafe, but didn't really have time for sightseeing in Cahors because we were on a mission.
From Cahors we followed the river upstream, as its valley got narrower and steeper-sided until it was like a canyon — a green and fertile canyon full of farmland and picturesque villlages. At Bouzies we took a side road up out of the valley of the Lot, to our destination: the Caves of Pech-Merle.
These aren't just any caves. About 20,000 years ago someone (several someones) drew some impressive pictures on the walls of the cave, but then the entrance was blocked by a landslide until 1922, when a local teen found a way in. He told the local priest about the cave pictures, and the priest, a well-educated fellow, did an exhaustive survey of the cave and brought it to public attention.
For our purposes, a cave discovered in the 1920s is the "sweet spot" for looking at cave pictures: if it was opened earlier, some local promoter would have blasted a road into it, or "improved" the cave paintings with touches of his own, or mined it for limestone or something. A few decades later and it would not have been open to the public at all. Pech-Merle is about right: there are stairs, handrails, and electric lighting, but that's all. No smoking, no snacking, and no photography allowed.
What the cave does have is cave paintings. Elegant brush-sketches of mammoths and bison, using just a few lines to depict an animal. Elaborate spotted horses, making use of the natural shapes of the rock like geological sculpture. A bear's head chiseled into the side of one passage, showing an understanding of perspective because the image is elongated on the wall but looks right from the entrance.
It also has some natural curiosities: spots in the wall gouged by cave-bear claws; some astonishing calcite "pearls" the size of ping-pong balls, formed in a natural basin where flowing water kept them turning as they grew so they're perfect spheres; footprints of a 13-year-old in 10,000-year-old mud, preserved by a thin calcite layer; and the root of an oak tree which grew down through the cave roof to the floor in search of water.
That last item suggests why this cave is still open to the public: I don't think Pech-Merle is going to last much longer. A few dozen rainy summers and an earth tremor or two are likely to turn the chamber of the oak root into a sinkhole open to the sky. The cave is very damp, and I suspect the pictures we see now are only the survivors of a much larger gallery erased by moisture.
You can find out more at the Pech-Merle Web site.
The tour of the cave lasted a couple of hours (if you go, bring a sweater — it's a steady 50 degrees F in there, and damp). We rested up in the car for a few minutes, then meandered for a couple of hours through the countryside until we found a way onto the autoroute. We stopped for dinner in the surprisingly delightful town of Sos, just a few miles away from our base in Cazaubon. We dined at a cafe on the arcaded old square, and returned to our hotel very content.
Next time: Dinner!
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