The Cave of Niaux

An electric torch illuminates.
Spikes like medieval guardians
jut from the cold ceiling
to protect and warn.

Our guide, a French young man,
halts twenty sojourners.
Here are dots and dashes
like prehistoric Morse code--

the most common paintings,
red the most frequent color,
claviforms the most frequent shape:
thick lines that flower at their ends.

We trek on, avoid little cavities,
slopes that slip a foot
like a bar of soap out of hand.
I marvel at natural forms,

stalactites that seem to melt
in waves of smudged ice,
the heights and black holes,
passages that require knee bending.

Now begins the most important
ceremony. The young man
stops on the other side of the rope,
orders all torches shut & bunched together.

We have reached the Salon Noir
where only he can make a light,
dispel the frigid black,
a cave where ancestors came.

He waits for silence,
then focuses his light
on our first sight of animal forms,
a revelation.

From these cold, faceted walls,
messages from a prehistoric past.
The paintings speak to my living heart:
a deer stag, a congregation of horses.

The words our leader utters
speak to my left brain,
the images speak to my right,
no words, only heart.

We move on, a hushed group now,
concentrated, children in front.
All thought of individuals vanished
on this pilgrimage to the past.

The room is high as any cathedral,
the bison, the ibex, the aurochs,
the horses and deer,--these dominate
depths of my sincere & reverent being.

An arrow in the side of a bison
burns, like the bleeding side of Christ.
I think of Zuni fetishes & pots:
heartlines on deer and bear.

I imagine the height of the ceiling,
Cro-Magnon congregated below,
in a ritual I'll never know.
My own must do.

We ask our feeble questions,
try to probe a mystery
dark as a Greek rite.
The guide knows and he does not know.

We gather torches and trek back,
different now, bonded,
purposeful, if only for the moment.
The opening blinds like a blast.