In other words, when the caves that lay below the village fields were about to be discovered, which would bring millions of visitors to Santillana, the town was already a poetic, pastoral museum; today it is a national treasure in which the Barreda palace has been converted to a handsome parador where one can obtain good meals and from which he can study the shields and explore the caves. There are few small towns in Europe more worth a visit than this.
The caves, at first sight, were merely a repetition of what I had come to know along tourist routes, whether in the Shenandoah Valley or along the rivers of Europe. Compared to the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico they are trivial in size, but they are clean and well lighted and their small rooms give a sense of underground living.
One area led to another of no conspicuous interest, but at the end of the trip I came to a low-ceilinged room about fifty feet long by thirty wide—as big as a motion picture house in a small village—and when my eyes had adjusted to the restrained light and when I looked upward I saw something so much grander than I had been led to expect that I can describe it only as one of the major surprises of my adventures in art. I had known the art was there. I could visualize what the wild bulls looked like. I knew what colors had been used to outline them, and I even knew how particular animals stood. But knowing all this, I knew nothing about the impact of this silent, hidden room upon the imagination.
For example, I had always believed that the great bulls of Altamira ranged along the walls of the cave. They are all on the ceiling. I had supposed I would find no more than a dozen good specimens. There are about thirty, each one a major work of art. I had supposed the colors to be faded, as they are in other prehistoric caves, and the bulls mere outlines which the mind fills in with pigment. Instead they are as bold and fresh in their color as if they had been painted last week. To stand at either the high end of the cave or the low and to look across the expanse of ceiling and see the animals rising and falling mysteriously along the rocky surface is to see not a prehistoric drawing but a field of bulls the way artists some seventeen thousand years ago must have seen them on the seacoast plains bordering the Bay of Biscay.
The thing that surprised me most, as I recall this amazing room, was the series of bulls constructed around rocky protuberances which jutted down from the ceiling. Mostly these extrusions are elliptical, but some are circular; they project eight or ten inches or perhaps even a foot, forming kinds of rocky hummocks standing forth from the rocky pasture lands. On these humps the ancient artists, using a trickery not surpassed by Salvador Dali, drew sleeping animals, wonderfully curled, with their feet tucked under them and their heads resting on their forelegs. The sense of reality thus created is magical; the bulls look as if at any moment they might rise from their slumber. One of the first French scholars to study Altamira summed it up in a phrase that has not been equaled: ‘This cave is the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art.’
John Fulton, studying the manner in which the pigment had been applied, pointed out something that I had not seen for myself: ‘Nowhere in the cave is there a hunter, or any weapon used in hunting. The men who drew these animals must have loved them.’ I’ve since seen a study which claims that the circular animals painted on the protruding rocks are wounded and about to die, but I saw no evidence of this and I suppose Fulton was closer to the truth. These are drawings done by men who studied animals and who loved them, the way the farmers of present-day Santillana love their beasts and share their houses with them, even though in the end they must live off them.
The cave was enhanced by a poetically enthusiastic guide four feet eight inches tall who spoke with swift impartiality a blend of French, Spanish and English, intermixing his words in such a way as to create the impression that he was speaking some ancient language that might have been used by the cave men: ‘Regardez les animaux qui suivent el campo, comiendo, pensando, corriendo and lying down on their sides.’ I found that if I could catch only a few words in each language I was able to build up a picture of the cave as it must have existed when men spoke with similarly fragmented thoughts.
One of the most interesting aspects of Altamira is a museum some distance from the entrance to the caves, for it contains a collection of the artifacts found on the site. The caves were discovered when a huntsman’s dog fell into them one afternoon. The dog was pulled out and the incident forgotten until six years later, in 1875, when another in Spain’s long line of amateur enthusiasts, this time Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, heard of the cave and went exploring. It is interesting to note that it was only after four years of intensive work that the small cave containing the paintings was found by Don Marcelino’s daughter María, who stumbled upon the scene where bulls wandered across the ceiling. In 1880 Don Marcelino published his findings, only to be branded a fraud. It was years before the authenticity and significance of the find were recognized.
In the building of which I speak, a small exhibition has been put together of the things Don Marcelino found and meticulously catalogued. Here are the stone axes, the wedges, the arrow points and the thin bones pierced to serve as needles, vestiges of a complex civilization. Especially attractive to anyone interested in art is a considerable group of sea shells, each containing the dried-out remnants of paint used by the prehistoric artists: red, black, gray, yellow, brown, white. Many of the pigments are the same as those employed by artists today, particularly a raw ochre which Fulton found in rock form on the beach nearby. If these dried colors were ground in a pestle and mixed with oil, they could be used now, and it is moving to think that in them we have the specific materials utilized in making the oldest surviving paintings in the history of art.
When I saw the shells I did not at first understand why they affected me as they did. Then I remembered. In the atelier of the American painter Karl Knaths at Provincetown on Cape Cod, I had seen exactly this type of shell, used precisely in this way and containing exactly these colors. In seventeen thousand years some of the ways of aft had not changed, and at last I understood why Fulton wanted to paint his series of pictures using bull’s blood, red ochre and native oils, for that was the way the whole exciting business had begun.
This Basque woodchopper has just won the national championship at San Fermín. He is as great a local hero as any matador.
I was profoundly affected by Santillana: the houses with their arrogant shields, the good smell of cattle, the beautiful Romanesque church, the timeless bulls wandering across the roof-land meadows, and the seashell palette with its dried-up paints. I wanted time to think about this concentration of experience, so I walked slowly out of town and up the steep Camino Comillas to the fork where a secondary road branches off to Suances, and there sitting on a stone wall I had a splendid view of the region. Low mountains hemmed in the village and meandering stone fences outlined the fields. Red roofs marked the houses I had enjoyed and huge barns proved that the land was profitably farmed. This was northern Spain at its best, heavy with trees and richness, and I wondered if it were possible that the prehistoric men had lived above ground, reserving the caves as religious sites or refuges in time of war. If they lived on this particular bit of land they knew beauty at first hand, and it was this natural beauty that had characterized their art. I took a few steps backward, and I had crossed the watershed. Santillana had vanished and I was looking down at the Bay of Biscay, where rolling hills dropped to the sea, taking with them lonely, weather-beaten trees and a very old church that seemed about to plunge into the waves. Sunset was coming on and men were leaving the fields and heading for homes I could not see. They had been tending corn, which grows abundantly in these parts but is eaten only by animals.
It was night and I returned to Santillana, where the only argument that Vavra and Fulton and I were to have in five months of delightful travel ensued. There was a chirping sound, and Vavra said, ‘Oh, it’s owls.’
Without thinking that I was contradicting a professional naturalist, I blurted out, ‘More likely frogs.’
‘Co
uldn’t be frogs up there.’
‘Tree frogs.’
Vavra ridiculed this supposition and we agreed to lay our disagreement before Fulton, who said that to his uneducated ear it was neither frogs nor owls, so we turned to local experts. The first five farmers, who had lived all their lives in the presence of this sound, gave such radically different answers that I will merely repeat them.
‘It comes from squeaking machinery.’
‘It’s a kind of fish that lives in the ditches.’
‘An insect. Very bothersome.’
‘It’s made by the swallows going to bed.’
‘Snails. It’s the mating call of snails.’
Now, obviously the sound came from either an owl or a tree frog, and to have five local experts fail even to include these animals in their suggestions was unnerving, but Fulton came up with the first practical observation: ‘Whatever it is, is singing down there in that sewer.’
Vavra refused to accept what seemed to me conclusive evidence that the singers were frogs; he claimed that what Fulton was hearing was an echo coming from the sewer, and we left Santillana not knowing what was responsible for the twilight serenade, but some days later Vavra, who takes these matters seriously, reflected, ‘It would be extraordinary for an owl to live in a sewer.’
Excellent as Santillana was, it was our third excursion that remains most vivid in my mind. I have never bothered much about whether or not people will remember me when I am dead; but I am sure that as long as my generation lives, in various parts of the world someone will pause now and then to reflect, ‘Wasn’t that a great picnic we had that day with Michener?’ I have lured my friends into some extraordinary picnics, for I hold with the French that to eat out of doors in congenial surroundings is sensible: in Afghanistan we ate high on a hill outside Kabul and watched as tribesmen moved in to attack the city; at Edfu along the Nile we spread our blankets inside that most serene of Egypt’s temples; in Bali we picnicked on the terraces and in Tahiti by the waterfalls; and if tomorrow someone were to suggest that we picnic in a snowstorm, I’d go along, for of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do. Picnics are the apex of sensible living and the traveler who does not so explore the land through which he travels ought better to stay at home.
One of my happiest experiences in Spain was the discovery, many years ago, of a remarkable American woman who loved picnics almost as much as I did. Patter Ashcraft, in her late thirties, the descendant of a distinguished Cleveland family, had been early in life inoculated with bull fever. When I first knew her she had a monstrous Buick convertible, in which we drove like demented Spaniards, but now she had a more sedate Volkswagen, in which she followed the ferias up and down Spain, spreading hilarity wherever she struck. She was known to her friends as L’Incomparable, and she spoke in such a low whisper that her husband Edwin, a Princeton CIA type, had to be constantly reminding, ‘Darling, turn up the volume control.’
It was during the Sevilla feria one year that we discovered our mutual interest in picnics; we organized repeated forays into Las Marismas, and in subsequent years we had cajoled our friends into the countryside at Salamanca, along the western rivers of Spain, in the rural areas near Madrid, and at the spot from which El Greco painted his famous view of Toledo.
Patter and I disagreed on only one detail: she thought a picnic should be composed only of items that could be bought in stores, like a round of cheese, a slab of ham, six bottles of wine, whereas the best picnic I had ever attended prior to Pamplona had consisted of ramekins of lima beans baked with traces of baked ham, garlic and blackstrap molasses, a green salad with a good dressing and ice-cold eclairs, three to a customer. In other words, Patter was of the American school; I of the French—and the latter is obviously superior.
On this day Patter’s theory was to prevail, and her car was loaded with choice cans and bottles when we set out to a picnic ground which I had selected years before; I had spotted it on my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. We were eight as we left Pamplona after the morning running of the bulls: Patter and her husband; Bob Daley, long-time European sportswriter for the New York Times, and his French wife, both with a good sense of what makes a picnic; Vavra and Fulton; the Hemingway double and I. We were headed north, toward the Pass of Roncesvalles, that historic and mystery-laden route through the Pyrenees which Charlemagne had used in 778 for his retreat through the mists and where he had failed to hear the battle horn of his dying Roland.
The success of our picnic was assured by the fine tins Patter had bought and by the rare site I had selected, but insurance was taken out when Bob Daley, fearing that we didn’t have enough food, stopped in the town of Espinal, and while we seven studied the fine modernistic church, quite radical in its architecture, he bought an extra loaf of bread, and in doing so, acquired a culinary masterpiece: it was round and flat, about the size of a large chair cushion and not more than two inches thick, so that it was practically all crust, and better crust was never baked.
We drove to the statue of a pilgrim which marks the southern end of the pass, and thought with what relief the religious wanderers of the medieval period must have reached this spot and given thanks to the statue for having escaped the robbers that infested the dark woods of the area. Farther on, at the lonely monastery, the gates of which had rescued thousands and fed millions in the long years of its existence, the others studied the stalwart and well-carved church, but I wandered through the network of stables and barns from which the small fields in the pass had been farmed for twelve centuries. Everything was low and compact, to fight against the winter winds that tormented the area, and all things had a sense of past ages, so that one stood surrounded by history, whether in the barn or in the transept.
I had in mind a spot well beyond the monastery of Roncesvalles, a spot where a small stream came out of a woods, but Patter was by now in the lead car and she caught sight of a meadow far below the road where seven rivulets converged, their banks lined with moss-covered trees, and when I saw it I had to acknowledge that her choice was best. We lugged our tins and bottles and Bob Daley’s marvelous chunk of bread down to the seven streams, and there in a glade so quiet, so softly green that it seemed as if defeated knights might have slept in it the evening before, we spread our blankets and prepared the meal.
It was not a picnic we had but a kind of dedication. We were in a pass where significant events had occurred, where the legend of Roland had been created to give meaning to Christianity’s fight against Islam, and before we had been in the silent place for a dozen minutes it had possessed us and made us a part of history. ‘If there ever were dryads,’ Vanderford said, ‘they must have lived here.’
For some hours we wandered along the rivulets and talked of the feria at Pamplona. One group of trees had strange knees that protruded to make fine chairs, and in them we sat as we discussed the bullfighters, the disappointments they had caused and the near-tragedies that had occurred at the running of the bulls. As we ate, and relished the bread from Espinal, John Fulton told of the American military personnel in Spain who had planeloads of American bread, white, gooey, lacking in everything except chemicals, flown across the Atlantic to the PX’s ‘so that our children can grow up knowing what real bread is.’ The idea was so fascinating that no one could think of any comment.
And then the mysterious thing happened that made of this picnic with Charlemagne a thing of haunting beauty, so strange and memorable that all who participated would afterward say, ‘Remember that picnic in the Pass of Roncesvalles,’ except that Peggy Daley, being French, would call it ‘Roncevaux.’ A fog rolled in and blotted out the sun. It was not a cold fog, but it was heavy, and soon we were immersed not in a woods cut by rivulets but in a dream through which strange figures moved and horns echoed. We could barely see from one to the other and the trees on which we had been sitting became vague shapes, but no one thought to leave, for a curious light pervaded
and voices seemed unusually clear, though echoes were no more.
The voices said strange things. Bob Vavra surprised us by announcing that he was a gypsy, a real gypsy with roots in Bohemia in Czechoslovakia. ‘You ought to see my father in California. In his seventies and as bronzed and lean as a hickory limb.’ We recalled that unbelievable day, May 23, 1435, when through these passes came the Original Band of gypsies to burst upon an unsuspecting Spain. They were led by that engaging rascal, Thomas, self-proclaimed Earl of Little Egypt. The gypsies had learned that then as now Europeans were easy targets if one announced himself an earl or a duke or a count, so Earl Thomas brought along a couple of each. The gypsies had also learned that Christian Europe was much concerned about the advance of Islam, so Thomas explained that his band had been forced to flee from Little Egypt because they were Christians and their kingdom had been overrun by the infidel. Thomas said he could stay in Europe only a little while, collecting funds for the recapture of his native land. Then, at the head of a mighty crusade, he would lead his victorious Christians back to Little Egypt and win new laurels for the faith. What had made him an earl? He was vague about that. Where was Little Egypt? He was vague about that, too. When would the crusade start? Any day now. In the meantime, money must be collected, and for a whole hilarious decade Earl Thomas and his brazen band hoodwinked Spain and gathered funds. ‘Spaniards have ever since held gypsies in low regard,’ Vavra reflected. ‘Up to a few years ago they could have no passports, were not inducted into the army and suffered all sorts of restraint. You’d be surprised how many Spaniards stop cold dead when I say innocently, “But I’m a gypsy.” ’ What was at first held most strongly against them was the fact that after gathering all that money from Christian Spain, they made no effort to recapture Little Egypt, nor would they even divulge where it was.
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