Man's Oldest Shrine

Nineteen years ago, two boys out hunting in the Dordogne region of France chased a rabbit into a hole. Enlarging the hole, the boys lowered themselves into a vast cave that had been sealed away for untold thousands of years. The cave's limestone floor proved disappointingly bare of treasures—which is what boys naturally expect to find in caves—but the walls, in the eye of their flashlight, swarmed with strange painted beasts. Some 20,000 years old, the pictures were almost perfectly preserved. They had found mankind's oldest shrine, painted by Cro-Magnon man.

Since then, tourists and art students have flocked into the Lascaux Cave, bringing with them damp air which threatened the existence of what they came to see. Taking alarm, French authorities closed the cave during the winter months while they installed air conditioning of the sort used on submarines, will celebrate the reopening next week.

This year's tourists will find nothing changed except the atmosphere, will step through double doors of bronze into a dreamlike world that is just as grand in its weird way as the Chartres Cathedral. A feeling of religious awe pervades the place. But anthropologists incline to believe that it was used not as a center of worship but of mere hunting magic. The so-called "realism" of the pictures baffles scholars, because thousands of years later, the Cro-Magnon's successors drew only crude symbolic pictographs. One possible explanation: the paintings are not deliberate copies of the animals but swift tracings of visions such as children see in a flickering fire. Painted by firelight, often one atop another, they have the look of fire shadows. Conceivably the Cro-Magnon artists painted just what they saw looming, falling and gliding along the rough walls of their vast hollow shrine: animals immaterial, yet visible.

They must, like Adam, have felt the animals to be brothers, for the Cro-Magnon's animal paintings display a range of feeling such as civilized men attribute only to civilized men. To the Cro-Magnons the animals they hunted were fellow spirits, not just flesh.