Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, Alyson Waters Read Free Book Online Page A

of passengers will at last be guaranteed on transatlantic liners? I should hope my observations will be taken seriously. As for this most recent postponement of my narrative’s development, it will at least have allowed us to focus for a moment on what is happening elsewhere. One would too easily have a tendency to cut oneself off from the world. In fact, this might not be digression’s only charm: perhaps I have made more progress than it seems – perhaps, if you think about it, digression really is the shortest distance between two points, the straight line being so very congested.

 
    T O SWEEP , but also and on a regular basis to gently brush with water the cave engravings that are covered in clayey drippings, to spray the walls with a (10%) formalin solution every week in order to combat the proliferation of algae, moss and lichen, fungus, mold and mildew, all the destructive thallophytes, and to dissolve as well the bat droppings, the acidity of which corrodes the rock, which then becomes friable and crumbles, even if today there remain only a dozen or so chiropterans in the cave, whereas, when it was first discovered, there lived a colony of one thousand. Where have they gone? And where did they come from, how long had they been there, where do bats come from? I’ve often wondered. I’ve always been very curious about bats, that life after death of theirs intrigues me no end. There is nothing less concrete than a bat, nothing more stealthy or noiseless than a bat, fluttering as if in a cage when it’s in the open air, but uncatchable, never in contact, never on the ground: eschatology could not better describe our immortal soul. Every mystery pales in comparison to this one; it touches on the true nature of the soul and the conditions of its afterlife, a twofold enigma that also concerns bats, you can draw your own conclusions.
    Some by the hundreds find refuge in the painted caves, our oldest sanctuaries. I deplore the fact that the builders of churches and cathedrals,following the orders of religious authorities blinded by vanity or prompted by their will to power, propelled these aerospace edifices skyward: the higher and pointier they are, the farther they rise from the ground, the more solemn the homage to the Creator, whereas to truly give thanks to Him, it would seem more appropriate to withdraw into the very heart of His creation, to get as close as possible to the earth’s central core, that flawless original diamond that was gradually covered in sediment, tainted, carbonized, buried beneath the mud and petroleum produced by decomposition, all the strata of lies, of dissembling, granite slabs, leaden weights, funerary marbles, rough barks, old crusts, all the way up to this greensward, these fatuous flowerets. Prehistoric artists worked in this direction, toward the depths, their frescoes extol a dynamic world dominated by the powerful and resolute figures of mammoths and bison, where man, beset by instincts as vague and fickle as his desires, remains in the background, his true place in the territory, that of the most ill-favored creature ever in all his nakedness of a beast flayed alive, his skin as sensitive as the water’s surface and his hunger perpetual. The prehistoric artist revered these splendid, sturdy animals; they had no weaknesses, no uncertainty; their senses warned them about the future, they fled winter before the first chill, whereas man awoke one morning shivering, every season took him by surprise, disoriented even when he stayed in the same place, day in day out. Perhaps the first hunting rites performed in these caves in fact evolved not, as I say rather rashly a little further down, from a belief in their magical powers, but from a more or less conscious need to punctuate that laboriously begun, unsettled existence that had no temporal supports or reference points in comparison to the calm self-confidence of animals that simply had to live their lives in order to fulfill their