Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe | Page 7

be harpooned, must have multiplied enormously--for every overhanging rock, every cavern, even every fallen block of stone, has been utilised as a habitation. Where a block has fallen, the prehistoric men scratched the earth away from beneath it, and couched in the trench. The ground by the river when turned up is black with the charcoal from their fires. A very little research will reward the visitor with a pocketful of flint knives and scrapers. And this is what is found not only on the main artery, but on all the lateral veins of water--wherever the cretaceous rocks project and invite to take shelter under them. Since the researches of Lartet and Christy, it has been known as an established fact that these savages were indued with rare artistic skill. Their delineations with a flint point on ivory and bone, of the mammoth, reindeer, and horse, are so masterly that these men stand forth as the spiritual ancestors of Landseer and Rosa Bonheur. And what is also remarkable is that the race which succeeded, that which discovered the use of metal, was devoid of the artistic sense, and their attempts at delineation are like the scribbling of an infant.
Of late years fresh discoveries have been made, revealing the fact that the Paleolithic men were able to paint as well as to engrave. In Les Combarelles and at Font-de-Gaume, far in the depths, where no light reaches, the walls have been found turned into a veritable picture- gallery. In the latter are twenty-four paintings; in the former forty- two.
Doctor Capitan and the Abbé Breuil were the first to discover the paintings in Les Combarelles. In an account read before the Academy of Sciences, they say: "Most frequently, the animals whose contours are indicated by a black outline, have all the surface thus circumscribed, entirely covered with red ochre. In some cases certain parts, such as the head of the urochs, seems to have been painted over with black and red together, so as to produce a brown tint. In other cases the head of the beast is black, and the rest of the body brown. This is veritable fresco painting, and the colour was usually applied after the outline had been graven in the stone. At other times some shading is added by hatching supplied after the outline had been drawn. Finally, the contours are occasionally thrown into prominence by scraping away the surface of the rock around, so as to give to the figures the appearance of being in low relief."
These wall paintings are by no means unique. They have been found as well at Pair-sur-Pair in Gironde, and in the grotto of Altamira at Santillana del Mar, in the north of Spain.
Still more recently an additional revelation as to the artistic skill of primeval man has been made; in a cave hitherto unexplored has been discovered actual sculpture with rounded forms, of extinct beasts.
These discoveries appeared incredible, first, because it was not considered possible that paintings of such a vastly remote antiquity could remain fresh and distinguishable, and secondly, because it was not thought that paintings and sculpture could be executed in the depths of a rayless cavern, and artificial light have left no traces in a deposit of soot on the roof.
But it must be remembered that these subterranean passages have been sealed up from time immemorial, and subjected to no invasion by man or beast, or to any change of air or temperature. And secondly, that the artists obtained light from melted fat in stone bowls on the floor, in which was a wick of pith; and such lamps would hardly discolour ceiling or walls. Of the genuineness of these paintings and sculptures there can be no question, from the fact that some are partly glazed over and some half obliterated by stalagmitic deposits.
Another discovery made in the Mas d'Azil in Arriege, is of painted pebbles and fan-shells that had served as paint-pots. [Footnote: Piette (E.), _Les Galets colorrés du Mas d'Azil._ Paris, 1896.] The pebbles had been decorated with spots, stripes, zig-zags, crosses, and various rude figures; and these were associated with paleolithic tools. In the chalk of Champagne, where there are no cliffs, whole villages of underground habitations have been discovered, but none of these go back to the earliest age of all; they belong to various epochs; but the first to excavate them was the Neolithic man, he who raised the rude stone monuments elsewhere. He had learned to domesticate the ox and the sheep, had made of the dog the friend of man. His wife span and he delved; he dug the clay, and she formed it with her fingers into vessels, on which to this day her finger-prints may be found.
These caves are hollowed out in a thick bed of cretaceous rock.