Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, Alyson Waters

up its initial endowment. Goodwill is never lacking, nor is noble ambition, nor fierce determination, the heart is in it, but our numbed extremities betray us. Only my foot slipped as I was walking along the ledge. My hand will not be helpful as long as it cannot grasp running water like a rabbit by the scruff of its neck. I put my finger in the secret gears that tirelessly turn the pages of this catalogue and here I am, trapped, cornered, carried away against my will by the mechanical movement, anyone could take my place, any finger, I don’t countanymore, and if I were an animal, I would be the waterwheel donkey, if I were an edifice, I would be a mill, as a vegetable I am the artichoke that one pulls the leaves off, I am also a shutter that flaps, a wave covering a wave, a meat cleaver. The pages turn, and now we see a copy of the negative hands disseminated throughout the cave – the artist applied an open palm to the cave wall and projected red or black powder onto this surface by blowing through a hollowed bone, then took his hand away – and these hands have been groping around for fifteen or twenty millennia, and mine gropes with them, I can pull it away, my print will remain. I have touched the back wall and I shall stay stuck to it, I won’t go beyond it either, impossible; it’s already lovely to have got this far, it was not without sufferings, look at all those twisted, mutilated hands, deformed by arthritis, decalcification, eaten away by frostbite or gangrene. All these old man hands groping along until the catalogue’s final pages. Then finally one of them closes it.
    Sometimes I am a little bit hard to follow – but so-called “born leaders” are mostly shadowed by jealous men armed with knives waiting for the right moment – and it is precisely because my limp causes a deviation in all my trajectories and reroutes me three times over three meters that I was chosen to lead and comment on the guided tour through the Pales cave network. I am no fool. Only a lucid mind can understand the principles of the labyrinths dreamed up by architects and manage to get out of them, but it takes a system of thinking that is sufficiently confused and delirious, or excessively logical, to orient itself in the mazes dug out by rivers. Glatt and his ilk did not appoint me by chance. True, they are beginning to regret their choice. According to them, I’ve done nothing since I’ve been here, the dead Boborikine is moreactive than I am, more efficient, and at least he has remained faithful to this vocation. He is worried about the future of paleontology. He is exchanging molecules. He is becoming mineral. His remains already contain less carbon 14 than they did before, and this progressive diminution will allow us periodically to take a bearing. And so we shall not let ourselves be fooled by the speeding up or slowing down of History; we need only examine Boborikine’s bones scientifically to know the time and situate ourselves very precisely in it. For – and perhaps you’re hearing it from me first – dread death occurs at least forty thousand years after the official death certificate is written, when our last atoms of carbon 14 are eliminated. Only then do we cease to emit radiation and only then is the fate of our soul sealed for good. May God on that day welcome Boborikine into his holy keeping.

 
    I S IT BECAUSE I am an archaeologist – trained as one and derailed as a result – that I am surprised that so few widowers, widows, and orphans are sufficiently affected by the unbearable absence to break into the dead person’s grave a few days after he or she was buried to see his or her face one last time even in this sorry state, even through their tears, to embrace the body one last time before it will truly be too late, and to verify that it really belongs to the person they thought it did and reassure themselves that he or she has not regained consciousness? This all too rapid resignation smacks of