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He arrived in Aguilar after dark. Consequently he saw nothing of the spaces where he was to conduct his investigation. This latter word stamped his assignment with a very solemn character. His newspaper had granted him a vacation that would keep him somewhat more on his toes than ordinary. During the course of these long weeks, he had to arrange for a few hours of work in the view of producing a feature on the Aguilar cave and a five hundred thousand-year-old pithecanthropus whose skeleton had been discovered . . . Cave, pithecanthropus, Aguilar, five hundred thousand years old . . . These words immediately seduced him. In them he recognized the glamour of sunlight and dryness. He pictured some sort of archaic ossuary that would be perfect for taking him out of his element. It was night in Aguilar. And cave, mountains, the ruins of Cathar castles which, as he’d been told, adorned the jutting rock in the distance—these were all still invisible, steeped in the warm balmy darkness. He set down his bags at the only hotel in the village. The owner had gone to bed a while ago and was asleep. Simon had to call out several times. The man woke up and came down. She showed the traveler to a rather spacious but shabby room. The faded, tattered wallpaper pleased Simon. An odor of scorched dust hung in the air. The window was open on the deserted village, the streets blanched by moonlight. Simon, wired from his travel fatigue, no longer felt like sleeping. After the hotelier handed over a bunch of keys, Simon stepped softly down the stairs, opened the door and went out.

The uneven, patchily tarred street wound between the housefronts and farm porches. Simon liked the coarse crust of this roadway hammered by winegrowers’ footsteps, stripping it smooth in places, or rubbing down the sidewalk curbs. A narrow passageway sculpted by life, molding itself to the least routine and passion. More a gallery than a street, a pebbly gully. Soon he was out in the country. The crickets riddled the shadows with their songs. A stubborn serenade transforming each molecule of darkness into a plangent needle. This proliferating hysteria was a new experience for Simon. The mute, damp, northern nights had no inkling of this persistent din. Up there the sludge bogs you down. But here the night was studded with cries; a frenzied energy expended upon this great web of insomnia. Each lot of land possessed its frantic cricket. Simon walked amid drunken trumpeters and sentries. Then the echoes dulled, his hearing grew accustomed. The howling mosaic smoothed into a more serene, droning chant. This concealed landscape lay all about him. He would have liked to glimpse it through some miraculous fissure in the shadows. To be in league with the gods through some sacred cunning that allowed him a glimpse of this light-drenched land for one minute as if the sun were at zenith. He believed in the possibility of these sovereign triggers able to open mountains, revealing to a few celestial voyeurs their ruby-flowered bowels. For himself alone to transform moon into sun. He desired to be caught red-handed in a cosmic breaking and entering.

Short of pulling off such grandiose embezzlements, he left the road, followed a path among the vines, knelt on the ground and touched this unknown, invisible earth whose dry hot grain gave him chills. Somewhere the cave gaped open. But nothing could indicate this fracture in the darkness. Slowly he gazed about, tried to discern this cavity in the rock. His rattled nerves peopled his mind with superstitions, innocent lusts. He breathed in the scent of this region for want of perceiving its lines, rifts, and colors. The lizards slept under the stones, and beautiful snakes in sheaths of soil. An entire bestiary, with coppery scales, currency of asps, solar venom. For him night was always linked to some secret brilliance. Almost red stars: Altair, Antares in Scorpio echoed with their myriads the constellations of the crickets. Simon listened to the millions of stars singing and saw shimmering the beetles’ golden pods under the vine stocks. The obscurity made strangely present the shadow of the first men. Espied form far back in the cave, what meaning did the circle of starry night posses? Shining points in a stone jaw . . . Canines of a thousand suns and molars of the sky. With what wild imaginings, what primitive anxieties, did they people this cavern opening through which the night flooded in, along with its noises, its thunders, its winged flights, its creeping breezes and astral bodies twinkling like animals’ eyes? Stars identical to those brief bolts brought into being by banging quartz stones against each other, transforming them into weapons and tools. These primordial words moved by Simon. By scratching the glebe he would have liked to bare the moonlight cavity preserving the first weapon and the first tool. Long before metal, long before fire. Still unformed objects in which only a trained glance could recognize the barest promise of human benefit. Stones where thought roams, rocks where the mind awakens. Ghosts in the cradle of the soil. Simon gladly would have slept the sleep of his ancestors in this mountain cave, halfway between the heavens and the earth, at the threshold of the visible, at the beginning of the world. Night was far advanced. The peasants were dreaming in the village of Aguilar. An empty room awaited Simon. But he remained stretched out under the soft leaves of the vineyard, amid the gnarled stocks and the Dionysian cymbals of the crickets. This is where daylight surprised him. He opened his eyes upon the amphitheater of the hills, the perpendicular rocks. The valley fashioned its hollow in this hard, bright casket. His heart beat before this bone-whiteness, these limestone skulls, these trunnions, these cliff roads, these scoured belemnite guards, these stone breasts crazed over with cracks and tortured with bumps and tendons. His gaze traveled along the vertical walls and gentle slopes. He spotted the cave hold, a dark patch in the pale greyness of a steep one hundred-yard rise. It was a suspended theater, a stage with a sunlit rim; then the cavity sank inward, forming a black niche. The night seemed to have taken refuge in this well up there in the sky. The mountain had swallowed the mass of shadows as if their immense opaque veils were needed to protect the dubious ancestral skeleton.