The Font-de-Gaume Cave

What a sight again when, the day drawing to its close, the tourist, with his head teeming with animal scenes and with the reds, browns and blacks which adorn them, perceives, on his way back, the dazzling lights of the setting sun lingering now on a corbelling, now on some of the tiny apertures opening in the high walls and from which, as Chateaubriand put it for other places, some black and glossy-winged rooks sometimes happen to shoot, glazed with red by the last gleams of daylight.

The rays which fall directly upon the scene, associated with those filtered through the foliage, seem to animate the powerful rock work, altemately yellowed with oxydation and blackened by stripes of manganese and colonies of lichens.

It is the selfsame movement, revealed some 15 000 years ago by the Magdalenians that we shall endeavour to revive through the text and illustrations of the first part of this book.

Then we shall evoke the researches devoted to the cave and the plateau as well as the direct interventions on the walls, in order to explain to whoever may be interested in this monument, a witness of a past time which is an honour to us, how it has been preserved.

J. Vouvé