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  • Charcoal
  • Rachel Unkefer (bio)

At first I didn’t understand what I would be guarding. When they said “cave paintings,” I pictured canvases hidden underground, like art stolen by the Nazis, but they turned out to be drawings of animals, in charcoal, right on the walls of a cave.

Nobody in the village knew about the cave before then, except the tourists who found it when they were scrounging around for mushrooms in the woods. Suddenly, the Gendarmerie Nationale showed up to guard the turnoff from the main road and there were all kinds of crazy rumors about drug smuggling and dead bodies. Ancient drawings on a wall were the furthest things from our minds.

They hired me and another guy to take turns keeping watch ten hours a day, three and a half days a week each. Besides the scientists from around the world who studied the cave, Serge and I would be the only two allowed to open the bank vault door in the side of the mountain. Even President Chirac couldn’t be let in without Dr. Fontaine’s permission.

There are lots of rules in this job. We’re to go in twice each shift with our tiny headlamps on and make sure nothing’s been disturbed, no landslides or floods or anything. Inside the cave, there’s no smoking, food or drinks, photography, bright lights, or touching the walls, because the drawings are thirty-something thousand years old. We shouldn’t stay inside too long at a stretch, either, because of toxic gases trapped in there.

Most of the time I sit in the little shack outside the entrance reading Spirou comic books and listening to American hip-hop on my portable cassette player. Serge told me he naps most of his shift because he stays up half the night with his girlfriend, and he has to catch up on his sleep somehow. Who’s going to know?

When I go in for my rounds, the air smells like wet socks mixed with pencil lead. It’s not unpleasant, just takes some getting used to. There’s a [End Page 102] thundering sound—the echo of water dripping from the ceiling—and the temperature drops a degree each meter I move in away from the entrance.

The tiny lamps don’t give off much light, and I can’t get very close, but from the metal walkway I can see the bigger drawings. There are some deer with really long horns and some rhinoceroses—animals we don’t have in France outside the zoo.

They’re called cave paintings, but there’s no paint. They look simple at first, but the more I focus, the more I see. Like the way the rhinoceroses fighting horn to horn have marks showing motion. And the shading on the horses’ heads, if you look closely, is really good.

After a few weeks, I’ve gotten to know where all the pictures are. When I first come in, I see the outlined hand prints, just above eye level, and then, around the first bend, a few of the deer. I call them gazelles, but I don’t know if that’s the right name. The next place I come to is like a room, where the walls are almost covered with animals. I’ve tried to lean out over the edge of the walkway to see better, but most of it stays in shadow.

Deeper in is my favorite place: a smaller room that I can see almost all of. It has three horses in profile, a couple of mountain lions, and a lot more gazelles and rhinoceroses. The last week or so, I’ve been spending more time here than is strictly necessary, just moving my headlamp all around. It’s like driving down the road at night, seeing a little patch at a time in the headlights. When I go back to my guard shack, I work on drawing a map of the cave with notes about which drawings are where.

On my second trip in today, I look down instead of at the walls, and my headlamp catches a glint of crystal on the floor. It...

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