Ugh, the day is not looking good. Overcast and with light rain, but that is not going to hinder a committed duo of explorers so, after a slow start (I had to go check out the market, where I bought two small lumps of black gold – les truffes!), off we went in our cute Cinquecento in the direction of Les Eyzies. We were almost there when we saw the sign to the Grotto de Rouffignac and quickly changed directions. Got there at 11h30, just in time for the midday pause that you see everywhere in rural France. Rats! They opened again at 14h00, so while we pondered our next move inside the car I let my gaze wander on the cliff facing us and saw, oh wonder of wonders, a massive amount of chert nodules protruding from the rock. But this time the nodules, while still irregular and cutting through the fabric of the grainstone limestones, formed stratiform concentrations that paralleled the flat-lying limestone beds. Suddenly my theory of odd concretions forming here and there crashed to the ground. How had such a massive amount of silica been introduced in a sequence whose chemistry was dominated by calcium carbonate? Going back to the Bahamas and Jamaica, the only suspects I can come up with are clays dispersed through the limestone which, upon weathering, mobilized their silica and cation contents to permeate through the limestones. Could the stratiform concentrations be paleo-levels of the water table? I will have much more to tell you about Rouffignac, which is another jewel of parietal art, but will again wait for a couple of days after I come back with Ronnie because I am sure he will be fascinated by this long cave.
After about ten
kilometers driving through the lovely French countryside we passed a duck farm,
where thousands of white ducks were enjoying the drizzle and feasting on the
young shoots of growing grass. It was a fois gras operation, where these
lucky ducks get to eat and eat and eat, so even-luckier gourmets get to enjoy
eating their very enlarged livers as the more sustainable version of pathé
de fois gras (one can still find fois gras of goose around
the Périgord, but it is very expensive and frowned upon by animal welfare
activists). We also get to enjoy all that delicious duck meat at very
reasonable prices.
Once we got to Les
Eyzies we found out that one of the exhibitions was closed because it was
Saturday! Really? We also learnt that most museums are closed on Tuesdays, so I
will have to take that into account next week, when Ronnie et al. will be
visiting me. Fortunately for us, the main Museum of Prehistory was open, and we
had a great time meandering through it. Géraldine is delightfully curious about
this period of human history, so every display brought new ideas to her fertile
mind.
Still raining, and we
were beginning to get hungry. We had packed a lunch, but the prospect of eating
it in the car was not very exciting. We thus went back to Rouffignac, ate our
lunch under the cover of the cave portal, and afterward spent a delightful
couple of hours admiring the natural beauty of the cave, the scratch marks and
wallows of the cave bears, and more than a kilometer into the ground the
fabulous cave paintings I will talk about later. All along I kept seeing these
“seams” of chert nodules, which must have made this place the epicenter of a
lively silex trade.
Our next stop was the Abri
Préhistorique de Laugerie Basse, a series of shelf shelters distributed
over a very long cliff that oversees La Dordogne, which were occupied
during the Magdalenian, about 15,000 years ago. Cro-Magnon people much
preferred these abris to caves, because the latter were damp and had
cave bears (!), whereas the former were sunny and afforded great views of the
river, wildlife, and incoming folks. Géraldine and I discussed the likely
dynamic of encountering other bands, and concluded that it must have been party
time, with all sorts of opportunities to exchange news and innovative
technologies, tell stories and dance, cook together and maybe find mates for
the youngsters of the crowd. By the way, did you know that in those times
reaching the age of 40 was apparently common? The only thing about living under
an abris was that from time to time the overhang would collapse and
crush whoever was there at the time (and create a permanent record of
occupation that anthropologists and archaeologists absolutely love).
From there we went to
Sarlat, which is a beautiful medieval city (although a bit too touristy), where
Géraldine treated us to a most delicious dinner that included, of course, a
first entrée of fois gras! The main dish for her were grilled medallions
of duck filet, and I had a traditional cassoulet (a white bean stew with
duck sausage and salt pork) that was the perfect warmer for what was turning
out to be a very chilly day.
The drive back to
Bergerac seemed slow, but that was because we were tired and had had a big
meal. The one moment of excitement was when I spotted a sanglier (a big
wild pig) trotting along the side of the road. It looked just like the sangliers
that Obelix hunts with such gusto in the Asterix BD!
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