giant television as our eyes adjust to the radiation of blue light . She flashes through images , a pre-screening of what we will see “ downstairs ” to avoid extended viewing of the cave . Each exhale degrades cave paintings , our lifeforce ending theirs . Millenia ago , mouths full of fat and red ochre , we pressed our hands against the walls , exhaling red through bone straws to mark our place here . Breath to create and now degenerate : the womb , always a temporary space .
∿∿∿
We watch our step as cool air hugs us down the moist passage carved in rock . “ The message of the caves is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place ,” Campbell reminds us , as the cavern expands and dims . We traverse the birth canal back to our origins the color of earth .
The woman in front of us is afraid of heights . The family behind us pushes closer in anticipation . Our skin cools from the July sun and relaxes to the voice of water dripping against subterranean silence . We continue so , calculated steps entranced by the tour guide ’ s flashlight — “ Here we come into an enormous chamber , like a great cathedral , with all these painted animals .”
An anthropology major on summer break moves light across the walls . Pointing out each shadowed figure “ painted with the vitality of ink on silk in a Japanese painting –– you know , just like that . A bull that will be twenty feet long , and painted so that its haunches will be represented by a swelling in the rock ”. Minerals engorge and engulf as the cavern continues . “ You don ' t want to leave ,” Campbell says of his own journey into prehistory buried along the French countryside as the flashlight gleams against another rock .