The Joy of High Places Page 16

  The path was littered with silvery mica schist and pinkish sandstone dotted with feldspar, and there were blocky black flows of igneous rock jutting down above us. Everywhere there was a story of a violent distant past, a landscape that showed its bare rocky bones, schist and granite and gneiss, each rock muttering of a saga that had lasted for eons. The villages and farmhouses and ruined chateaux were built of the same rocks and were so much part of the landscape they seemed another geological formation.

  Near the end of the second day, I stood in a tiny twelfth-century chapel at Rochegude, next to its ruined castle, once the home of the lords of Montlaur, and felt like I was in a cave. The curved Romanesque ceiling made a dome above me and I could nearly touch either wall if I stretched out my arms; it was as if I were within the rock, in the belly of the earth, even though I was on a crag far above a deep gorge. I walked out of the chapel and climbed down into the gorge, stepping like a goat into the narrow depths. The next morning there was a 500-metre climb upwards, a steep rise through wreaths of mist with a view at the top over to the chapel and the mountainous country beyond. The lords and ladies of Montlaur floated like wraiths in my mind.

  Later that morning Anthony and I followed a hand-painted sign leaning on farm machinery, indicating a buvette, a small bar. It had been a hard struggle up the side of the gorge and the thought of a coffee had us both stepping along an unpromising cow-shit spattered track past more machinery, until we spotted in an open barn a trestle table with a few cups on it. I stuck my head in the doorway and saw a man in a wheelchair behind the trestle, and behind him, a small coffee machine. There were a few empty plastic chairs scattered about.

  ‘Vous vendez le café?’ I asked uncertainly.

  ‘Oui,’ he said, and, swivelling his chair, grabbed one of the stained cups, swivelled again, and started making the coffee. He was around 70, overweight, roughly shaven and roughly dressed. I asked if there was a toilet I could use and he indicated a room that had been added inside the barn. I went in and saw that it was his bathroom, with a wheelchair accessible toilet and shower, and a damp towel and clothes lying about.

  ‘You live here?’ I asked when I came out.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  We talked in French for a while as he slowly swivelled back and forth from the table to the coffee machine, to the fridge, to the sink. He was so far from anywhere. At the top of a wild gorge, only a muddy track in across the plateau. He couldn’t walk anywhere, but he could drive. He made a little income making a few coffees for walkers; no-one else came here. I didn’t ask why he was in a wheelchair, what had happened to him. I thought of my brother and his determination to walk again. It could easily have been him, here in this shed. Sometimes determination is not enough, the facts of the body will defeat you.

  ‘Un sorte de Calvaire,’ he said. A kind of Calvary. It sounded melodramatic to my Australian ears, but I knew it just meant ‘it’s bloody hard’ and was probably an understatement. I wondered how many people followed his clumsy falling-down sign and found his coffee shed; the man who couldn’t walk serving coffee to people who walked for fun.

  In the evening after we had arrived at the gite, showered off the sweaty dust of the day, and found a glass of red wine, Anthony read aloud from The Way of the World by Nicholas Bouvier. Bouvier and a friend had set out to drive a small broken-down Fiat from Belgrade to Turkey, Iran and India. On the side of the car they had painted a poem by Hafiz, a Persian poet:

  Even if your night’s shelter is uncertain

  And your goal is still far away

  Know that there doesn’t exist

  A road without an end –

  Don’t be sad.

  In the beginning of the book, Bouvier writes that as a boy he had ‘stretched out on a rug, silently contemplating the atlas, and that makes one want to travel’. Oh yes, the chant of names in an atlas: Venice, Istanbul, Samarkand, Tashkent ... Maps spread the world out into a flat surface that can be read; they transform the world into symbols and signs you can carry around in your pocket. Perhaps the earliest signs and marks made by humans were maps: the lines of rivers, the shape of hills, an impassable swamp, the warnings about bears and wolves, each impressed with a stick on mud or clay.

  Bouvier’s words flowed in the air, heightening the senses. He journeyed across the Middle East before I was born, yet he brought me into the present and into remembrance of times past. I remembered what I had seen that day, the old stone lavoirs for washing clothes and sheets, the métier à ferrer les boeufs to hold oxen while they are being reshod, and cabanes, which are tiny wheeled wooden houses for shepherds. The constructions reminded me of childhood – the lavoirs like the old cement basins we used to rinse sheets, the métier à ferrier les boeufs like the four-posted contraption my father used to support birthing cows.

  I thought often about my childhood farm as I walked, I suppose because we were walking through rough-and-ready farming country like the country where I’d grown up. There had been pretty woods at first – trembling-leafed birches, grey-green lichens, red domed mushrooms – patterned with soft fields and stone fences. But then we were on the moors: dry tough grasses, heather, rocks, upland marshes – bleak and exhilarating. There was a sense of a rougher life, the grass whitened by wind and sun and cold, shaggy cattle, farm-houses made of volcanic rocks, ragged crops of corn for fodder; and along the path, and often in fields, wild broom taking over. It was in this region that the Beast of Gévaudan roamed in the mid-eighteenth century, killing around a hundred people. At the time it was believed to be a gigantic wolf-dog, but today it’s thought it was more likely to have been an escaped lion. I looked at a drawing on a sign near a chapel and later saw a statue on a rocky hill, and was struck both times by the fearsome mythical image: its large mouth and teeth, its overly-long muscled body. It was an image of the fearful unknown that could leap out at you without warning and destroy you utterly.

  The paw-prints of the beast must have inspired terror whenever they appeared. They were larger than any other dog or wolf prints, and deeper too, and local peasants would have recognised it was an alien print immediately. I’ve always liked prints of every kind. Growing up on the farm, I could identify the foot-prints of each animal in the dust before I could read: a horse, a mob of sheep, a singular cow, many chooks, a dog, a cat, a turkey, a snake, lizards, a kangaroo. Prints let me know what is nearby, but I don’t think that’s the only reason I like them. The tracks my younger son once made in the snow in Paris, the hoofprints of horses on a forest trail in Galicia, the hieroglyphics of magpie claws on wet mud; they each move me to silence, make me feel tender. I’m drawn, too, to the imprint of bodies on the world, not just footsteps. Sometimes, after Anthony has got out of bed, I roll over and lie where his body has lain, press into his body imprint. When I travel, I have put my hand on tombs of saints or walls of grottoes not out of faith, but to touch where hundreds of thousands of other hands have smoothed rough rock into shiny stone. My palm to their palms.

  When I first read about the Laetoli footprints, the fossilised prints of three Australopithecus hominids who went walking on volcanic ash 3.6 million years ago, I felt the same mysterious heart connection. The Australopithecus walkers were not in any danger, the volcano was distant, but it had recently rained and made the ash damp. Even now, the speckling of raindrops can be seen on the fossilised ash. And the footprints of three hominids walking, the one behind putting her foot into the tread of the one in front, but not quite exactly, and another one, smaller, perhaps a child, walking beside them.

  At one point they paused and turned to the left before continuing on in the same direction.

  The sun soon dried the damp ash, which hardened and set the footprints forever. Millions of years later, Mary Leakey’s team of paleoanthropologists found them in the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania. The footprints they found under the sand – first an animal print, then 70 humanoid prints – became the earliest direct evidence that our ancestors did walk upright. I thought of
long-ago ancestors out strolling, one behind the other, pausing to check something out: a bird flapping away, or perhaps to discuss which way to go now – towards that hill to the left or straight ahead? It’s the pause, the turn and then the heading on that gets to me.

  It was the same when I saw images of the Mungo footprints, found by a Mutthi Mutthi woman, Mary Pappen Jr, in Australia in 2003. One cool Pleistocene day, 20 000 years ago, a family – adults, teenagers, a small child – walked across the wet claypans of Lake Mungo. Shortly afterwards sand blew into the footprints and preserved their shape as they dried out. The clay contained calcium carbonate, which hardened like concrete as it dried so the distinct prints are exactly as they were the day the family walked across the claypan. There are in fact 700 footprints at Lake Mungo, imprinted at different times, including a group of five hunters, running very fast, mud squeezing between their toes, and even a one-legged man hopping expertly, but it’s the small child who feels familiar. She paused, ran back in the opposite direction to everyone else, perhaps picked up a feather, a stick, then turned and walked back quickly.

  The tracks have been studied by archaeologists and by local Indigenous men and women. It didn’t take Pintupi trackers long to see the imprint of a man standing with a spear, the line of a spear being thrown, and where a woman had moved a baby from one hip to the other. They knew how to read the signs.

  When I first heard about both the Laetoli and the Mungo footprints, I immediately wanted to go and see them, but soon found out that both sets had been re-covered with sand to protect them, not just from vandals, but from the weather. I can gaze at photographs or models, but it’s not the same. I wanted to look at the real tracks – and, I admit, I wanted to touch them. I wouldn’t put my feet in their footprints, but like a devout pilgrim, touch them with my hands. Just very gently with my fingertips: fingertips on the footprint of a child who lived 20 000 years ago; a child who lived three and a half million years ago.

  And then I wondered if claw-prints and foot-prints inspired the first writing? Did we humans get the idea of writing from seeing a natural record of what had happened, imprinted in mud? The run of small hoof prints behind larger prints, the snake track in the dust, the crisscrossing of ibis tracks like a manuscript gone crazy, each patterning the clay by the stream – didn’t each one tell a clearly readable story? It would not have been so much of a leap to one day gather and flatten and smooth some clay from the same stream into a tablet and press shapes into it – a toe-print, a stick, a stone – and then show your brother.

  ‘What do you think this means?’ you ask.

  ‘It means you walked by the trees and up the stony hill,’ he answers.

  ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘that’s what it means’. And writing, a maze of signs pointing at all of reality – more than that, making reality spring into mind – came into being that day.

  The upland was an isolated place, even now. The plateau was over 1830 metres high and the people who lived there did not see the need to come down to the lowlands very often. It was late September and there was an autumnal chill, a sense of the world retracting for the winter ahead. I wore several layers, felt the cold air on my cheeks, and felt somehow at home. I mostly walked in silence, but every now and then I remarked or pointed with my walking pole at various things which, after a while, fell into categories of ‘things remarked upon’: types of crops, breed of cows (Highland cattle, from Scotland), types of rocks, the kinds and shapes of trees, the colour of soils, types of gates and fences, farm machinery, the beauty of the morning, anything that reminded me of something in a book.

  At Domaine du Sauvage, where we stayed in a huge thirteenth-century hospital founded by the Templars, I was seated at dinner next to Kenji, a young Japanese man. In fact, I only thought he was young – reading his face and his sweet uncertain manner, I placed him in his twenties, but he told me he was nearly 40. He showed me, and then others at the table, his book of drawings in pencil and black ink. He didn’t take photographs or write notes, but sketched what he saw. The neatness and precision of his drawings reminded me of Barney’s paintings, the exact recording of a world. There were fine architectural drawings of barns and crucifixes, and detailed botanical observations: rose hips, spear thistle, burdock; and sketches of creatures: the friendly black dog we had also met, a horse peering over a stone wall, bees, cattle.

  What I saw in his book was his walk, the things he ‘remarked’ upon, what attracted his attention and moved him to take up his pencil or his ink pen. I was looking through his eyes, walking in him. It was a finer journey than mine, more detailed. He said he walked slowly, stopped often, watched. ‘It will take me a long time,’ he said.

  In Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole the next night, I had a radio interview from Australia to talk about a book I’d recently written. I stood in the cold and deep silence behind the church, holding my phone high, trying to find and keep a signal from the other side of the world. I was tired and couldn’t find the words. That night I dreamed that one of my sisters had died; and then, a few nights later, I dreamed of Michelle, a friend who had died a few years ago. I didn’t know what to make of the dreams. The surreal stories of dreams are hard to read, like trying to read hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone. The images of death shimmered under the day, a kind of palimpsest of shadowy night images of motherless children beneath bright daytime scenes: eating apples in fields, sun on my face, deep dappled pathways through twisted beech forests. It felt as if the walking was making me more susceptible to impression, as if I were becoming clay.

  On the eighth day, the path descended 500 metres into the Lot Valley, leaving the moors behind. Anthony and I walked down through mottled light in beech forests and on stone-walled paths so old they had been worn metres below the level of fields. The country down here was warm and soft; the beeches gave way to oaks and chestnuts and the coarse moor grasslands were replaced by green meadows. On the side of the path grew yarrow and mint, dandelions and nettles, blackberries, blueberries and aloes. It looked like a land of plenty.

  But things were not what they seemed. In Belvezet we stopped at a stone barn where an elderly couple were serving coffee and orange juice, for a euro each, to walkers. More of the villagers came out, all of them elderly; I have a photograph of them coming to the barn on their sticks, like elderly children of Hamelin emerging from the cave at last, eager for company. I thanked the old woman and she said, ‘I don’t have to go and see the world; the whole world comes to see us’. Yes, I thought, that’s good, but soon these villages will be empty. The young people have already gone and the old people are lonely and will die soon enough. Only the villages that can sell their beauty and attract tourists will survive.

  In Conques a few days later, there were shops selling trinkets, and plenty of cafes and thousands of visitors, but nowhere to buy vegetables, fruit, meat, or groceries. The countryside all around was so beautiful it easily exhausted my adjectives – in fact, I simply wrote ‘bliss’ in my notebook – but the town had become a museum of itself. It had a cathedral with a stone carving of the Last Judgment above the main door, with the writhing damned on one side and the joyful saved on the other. There was also an abbey church built in the eleventh century, famous because it holds the remains of Sainte Foy, who was tortured to death by the Romans in the third century. The bones were kept in her hometown, Agen, but a thieving monk made off with the bones and brought them to Conques.

  I realise it’s the stories of wild beasts and saints’ bones imprinted in the landscape like a kind of strange dark lace that kept me walking as much as the landscape itself. I could read these stories in stone: I grew up with the idea of the damned and the saved, they echoed back to the child sitting in a church in the bush, looking up at the crucifix and plaster saints. I was a pilgrim, but not a holy one.

  I did see a holy pilgrim on the day we walked out of Conques. At least I thought he was one at first. The climb out of the valley was long and steep, not my favourite geography first thing in t
he morning. My calves were painful, stiff after a couple of days rest in Conques. I kept stopping and standing backwards on the hillside to give my muscles a break. I felt irritable. Despite the exhilaration of walking, a contradictory part of me hated making any physical effort, but I tried to hide it. At one point Anthony said, ‘Retrouvez votre sérénité ’. Chill out.

  ‘Don’t tell me how I should be’, I snapped.

  ‘No,’ he said mildly. ‘It was written on that post there.’ He pointed with his walking pole to a small neat sign that I’d missed.

  I laughed. ‘Okay, I’ll take advice from a post.’

  It was a few hours later that I saw the pilgrim. I was traversing a rocky hillside – Anthony was 50 metres or so ahead of me – and when I stopped and turned for a moment, I saw a man striding up behind me. He was lean, tanned, fit and wore nothing except a sort of kilt and boots and had a number of religious medals glinting on his bare chest. I was surprised by the medals – no-one else I’d seen wore any obvious religious images – but more by his nakedness – men just do not go about bare-chested in France. I didn’t think anything of it until he said something to me in French just as he was passing. I didn’t quite catch it, and asked what he said. He stopped on the rock above me and said it again, but again I didn’t catch it. But then he opened his kilt as if to adjust the tie or clip at the waist, just enough to reveal his genitals and said, and I caught what he said this time, ‘Est-ce que cela vous gêne?’ Does this embarrass you?

  ‘Non,’ I said, ‘pas du tout’. I even had the presence of mind to add, ‘Il fait chaud’. No, not at all, it’s hot weather.