Very few of the caves remain in good condition for study, and, even those have suffered a good deal of wear and tear from various rubberneckers ranging from aforesaid children to casual tourists who just had to check Altamira off on their Life List, to outright vandals. Not unsurprisingly, familiarity bred, if not contempt, a certain lack of respect for the phenomenon. John Singer Sergeant, not knowing the age or scale of the paintings, scribbled a few scrawls and a bison on a tavern wall in his painting of a flamenco dancer. Some people believed them to be the work of Roman soldiers, others were sure the Rom had done the deed, or that it was some kind of thieves' code. Almost everywhere there, where there was a cave, there were red dots, handprints, and strange beasties, a delight for venturesome kids with candles and a sense of adventure. And, it makes for caverns, and in some cases, dramatic cave-ins.Ĭave art was first discovered in northern Spain, where it was for many centuries, a local mystery. The limestone makes the ground alkaline, and makes the wine there have a natural affinity for shellfish: ancient seabeds greeting new oysters.
If that river were frozen, and I could walk underneath, I might be mighty superstitious about that arch, the way the Romans were about their triumphal arches: passing under one meant you were no longer a soldier, if you were one, and even today, at least one arch in Rome carries a powerful taboo.
Herzog calls it Romantic, Wagnerian (which called down the wrath of one reviewer, who invoked the Holocaust and what gives that German so-and-so the business of imposing his country's bogus mythology on people who would never have known such). It's limestone country there, though, and rock is more permeable there than here: over time, water dripping through wears it away, in one case, opening a dramatic archway near the paintings through which a river runs. To get to the Cave, there's a sturdy wooden walkway, and the entrance itself is behind a steel door which, in Herzog's narration is "like a bank vault", but to my eyes, looks gently anonymous, as if someone had simply hollowed out a Cold War era bomb shelter, and refitted it as storage for - what? wine from that vineyard? Servers for the local ISP? Or old movies…old photographs…archives of old pictures. In some ways, it has the ordinariness of any quasi-governmental facility: it's out in Rhone wine country, and the nearest landmark is someone's vineyard - here in Connecticut, it would probably be adjoining a apple orchard. Documentary film, by Werner Herzog (2010).