WITHIN THE EARTH
IN A NIMBUS of light, they moved through a corridor rendered smooth-sided by coursing water eons before humans walked there. Carbuncles of flint protruded unexpectedly from time to time. Occasionally Adam’s hand reached out to touch a rough patch glittering with mica. Far ahead in the dark, he heard the sound of rushing water, and he was afraid of needing to cross it, but the path broadened and ran parallel to the malevolent stream. Adam was grateful the river, terrible in its power and indifference, did not ask him to put even his foot into it. As the water became wider, its violence diminished and finally the flow spread into a broad, still lake. A small red canoe was lodged on the near shore of the pool, but it had room for only one, and Pierre made no indication that they should try to crowd aboard. Overhead, the ceiling arched high.
In this hollow space below the high stone ceiling, their footsteps echoed and mingled as they moved through the emptiness. Against his face, Adam felt a damp chill contradicting the cocoon of warm-seeming glow that surrounded them. While his nostrils constricted to stem the flow of fetid air, his jaw opened, and the air entered the little cave of his mouth and wiped itself on the plushy carpet of his tongue.
Pierre stopped to point down with his flashlight. The beam illumined a bottomless crevasse, a fissure more than a yard wide running in both directions as far as they could see. A great crack. There was nothing to do but step over it. There was no need to jump, but the step would require them all to stretch.
“Lucy,” Pierre said, “you will have to give a little leap. It’s not far, but your body will not want to do it.”
She simply nodded, stepped up to the abyss, looked straight ahead, and, without hesitating, pushed off and over. Modestly, she stood aside, out of the way, and Arielle immediately followed with no to-do at all about the effort. It was almost as though they had blinked collectively and then Arielle had already accomplished the step she needed to take. Pierre nodded at Adam, but Adam was afraid.
“Like a bull,” Pierre said.
Adam stepped back five paces and ran. He would not look down, he would not lower his head, he would look straight ahead like Lucy, unflinching. With every step he was afraid and the soles of his feet tried to recoil as though scorched, but he ran and leaped, landing far beyond on the other side, his entire body shrieking in protest. When his feet hit the stone, he stumbled. His body insisted, Yes, there was danger. Like a bad shepherd, Pierre had ordered Adam into danger.
“But you made yourself obedient,” Adam said out loud. They all stared at him as though he had referred to them, so he mumbled truthfully in explanation, “My body, like a herd of disobedient sheep, did not want to take its members across the divide.”
Where was Shakespeare when he needed him? Shakespeare to give him the words for what was never spoken but only thought before?
Pierre picked up a small rock, knelt carefully beside the great crack, and dropped the rock. They listened to it clatter as it fell, colliding with the walls of the split earth. Their flashlights wavered in their hands while they listened. There was no end to the falling, only a diminuendo like the hoofbeats of a galloping horse dying away in a distance.
“I have to make myself do it,” Pierre said to no one in particular. “Each time I have to make myself step over.” Pierre was not ashamed. “The body rebels, instinctively.”
And why had they come to this land of fissures and darkness? To see cave art, but so far there were no pictures. The place itself was a picture, a landscape Adam had never inhabited before. One of the passages opened into a great hall with a huge boulder in its center. So might the earth have fallen from the underside of heaven. Round as a globe, the boulder had dropped from a height beyond the power of their flashlights to illumine, though they all held their torches as high as their arms would reach, and Adam stretched tallest of all. The mass of the boulder was there simply to intimidate, but all they need do was to walk around it. It was inert, helpless.
“‘Potential,’ I call it,” Pierre said.
God’s Weight, Adam thought but did not say.
They placed their hands on the boulder as though to hold it in abeyance or to influence its disposition. Adam liked the gritty feel, even the chill of the rock flank, against his palm and fingers. Some of his smaller, weaker fingers were afraid, but his hand as a whole was confident. The flickering light cast their moving shadows on the stone.
The room narrowed to a corridor, and this time its walls were smoothly coated with white calcite. Again Pierre stopped. When he held his lamp close to the wall, its light was reflected in a white glow.
“Look beyond the surface,” Pierre instructed, and Adam thought his words were impossible nonsense. “Don’t look into the light. Pay attention to what the side of your vision can see.”
And then beneath the translucent calcite, Adam began to see the lines of a drawing. Something lived and had its being under the skin of calcite. His eyes traveled those charcoal lines, waiting for them to speak their form.
“I call it ‘The Kindness of Animals,’” Pierre said.
And then Adam saw a pair of giant C’s, the rearing up and reaching and return of curving antlers, of a male reindeer. The animal’s lowered head, even his tongue, was drawn there, and with him was another deer, resting or kneeling, receiving the kindness of that ancient tongue. “It’s like a painting at Font-de-Gaume,” Pierre said, “but larger. And look behind the female.” Then Adam saw curled and sleeping the small form of a fawn. Colors of reddish brown draped the backs of the animals; the pigment shaded in places to suggest the varying thicknesses and contours of their bodies. The color had its own richness, though it was cloaked by the milkiness of the calcite. Their hooves and the moment defining the reindeer eyes were black.
“He honors her achievement in giving birth,” Lucy said.
“At Font-de-Gaume, there is no little one,” Pierre said. “The tenderness between the two adults is simply there—who knows for what reason.”
In Pierre’s voice, Adam heard a tremor, a fissure, an abysm.
Pierre added, “Perhaps, at Font-de-Gaume, the female was tired, or dying.”
Death? Adam felt the shape of tears traveling his cheeks. He could have swiped the sliding tears away with the back of his hand, but instead he thought of their rounded form bulging on one side, their flatness on the other, of the flexibility of the flat side as it adjusted to the shape of his cheek. He would treasure each tear’s short life as a formed thing before it fell and splattered on the cave floor. He wept for himself, for the dark backward of time, and for this stony man Pierre, who would not allow himself to weep, though his voice might quake. Adam counted six tears like large apple seeds on each side of his cheeks as they traveled down, fell, and lost themselves on the stone floor.
What did this painting want to mean, and to whom? To Adam it said, You can have this. When you recognize tenderness, it comes to dwell in you. The painting of a tongue is a tongue speaking to you. The painting is a gentle, silent licking of your soul.
When they walked on, Adam felt the broadness of his own back. On that flat place, an image of tenderness could have been painted. The corridor opened again into a stone room. “Look up,” Pierre said.
In the wavering light, a multitude of animals ran across the ceiling. Adam gasped. While the reindeer had seemed beautifully arrested, here the giant creatures moved in unison. Pierre had them turn off their flashlights, but he quickly struck a match to light a thick candle from his pocket. Because of the flickering of the candle, a great ripple of shoulders and backs and bodies poured across the sky, the arch of rock overhead. Adam felt his body sway. Shaggy bison and aurochs tossed their heads and stirred up dust with their trampling. Rounded horses shifted their haunches. Lions sped forward with faces like wedges among the herds, and elephantine mammoths moved with curtains of hair swaying from their sides.
The contours of the cave, its bulges and declivities, helped to form their bodies, and the shifting shadows of those irregularities in the undulating light made the animals surge and retreat. Billows of calcite mimicked clouds, though sometimes the hooves seemed to spring from earth-rooted, jagged terrain. There was a single, magnificent elklike creature. Adam could have sworn those lordly nostrils flared with breath. The elk’s antlers branched and branched till it seemed he carried an impossible tree on his head, and he himself bifurcated into a kind of outreaching god hand.
Filling the not-sky that was arching rock, the rush and power of the animals overwhelmed Adam, and his heart galloped with their ecstasy.
“Like constellations,” Lucy said. “In the night sky, animals and giants populating the sky.”
A dark hole ascended upward from the ceiling, and Adam thought it might be a chimney through which all of these soaring creatures could funnel outward and into the night and on to the outermost reaches of darkness. Constellations, yes, they could become even that in distant space.
“See the great black cow,” Pierre said, pointing where the ceiling of the cave bent down to become wall. “She’s falling upside down from the sky. You can see her at Lascaux, too. No one knows her story.”
“Black as a piano,” Lucy said sadly. Her pale, fringy hand gestured at the panoply of rushing animals. “But what did it mean to them?”
“These paintings are a text,” Pierre said. “They are as much a text as the pages you saved, the ones inside the French horn case now, waiting. For me.”
Dizziness swept Adam’s mind. Animated by the flickering candle, five lionesses cleaved their way toward the others. Perhaps Lucy or Arielle—her name was fresh and frightening on the tongue of Adam’s mind—must become like a lioness, a power, a sister to those with whom she hunted. He closed his eyes for a moment.
“In their time,” Pierre went on, “these pictures were read, and they were copied many times, over thousands of years. Some painted twelve thousand years ago replicated those made twenty-four thousand years ago, and those were half inspired by, half copied from, paintings thirty-six thousand years back in time, and these—”
“Is each copy an interpretation?” Lucy asked.
“Who’s to say?”
“There.” Adam pointed. “A horse is running through feathery grass. Or is he in a shower of arrows?”
No one answered.
“Here are rhinoceroses, like ones in Chauvet and elsewhere,” Pierre explained. “Over thousands of years, the artists—shamans, whoever they were—continued to draw in the same style, to copy the drawings created thousands of years before their time. It’s the same with stories. Stories begat stories and were passed through the air from lips into ears until they became the written sacred texts our cultures hold so dear, our holy books, our bibles.”
Pierre’s words rattled and fell, like stones exploring a crevasse. Adam watched Pierre’s eager eyes move from figure to figure.
Because the dome of the ceiling was high, the artists would have needed to build scaffolding to create the soaring effect they wanted. They might have lashed poles and crossbars together. Like Michelangelo, Adam thought, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but the power of these animals seemed terrifyingly close, less remote than Michelangelo’s biblical figures. Except for his rendition of Adam, recumbent and limp, waiting for God to touch him, nothing of Michelangelo’s spoke like these beasts conjured with line and color from mute rock.
“Did they already know everything—these artists?” Arielle asked. “Did they know it all then?”
“Picasso said so,” Pierre answered. “He’d seen copies Henri Breuil painted of the bulls in Altamira.”
Adam had never liked Picasso; he thought his forms were cruel to soft bodies. Who was Picasso to pronounce on this? An opportunist. He hoped that Arielle did not worship Picasso. But Picasso had not seen this cave—only Pierre, and them. When a drop of water fell on Adam’s nose, he moved his position slightly and opened his mouth. He waited till a drop fell onto his tongue, and he swallowed. Shed for thee.
“How old?” Adam asked.
“Breuil’s copies were made in 1902. Picasso saw them when he was twenty-five.”
“How old are these paintings?”
“Older than Chauvet, which is older than Lascaux.”
“And Lascaux is—” Lucy asked.
“Eighteen thousand, six hundred years. And Chauvet is twice as old. And the style in both is much the same. So little evolution of style in all those millennia. Here—” Pierre stopped and gathered his breath. “Here I know we go back even further than Chauvet. I’ve carbon-dated. Back nearly all the way to when we, Homo sapiens, evolved. Back forty-seven thousand years.”
Lucy said, “Lascaux is closer to us, in time, than it is to these paintings.”
Adam wanted to weep again to think how long humans had labored to bring life from stone.
“There is a reason to paint on walls and ceilings,” Adam said. “It subverts their purpose to enclose. The walls become windows, portals to other realities.” Arielle moved beside him and encircled his waist with her arm, but it was Lucy’s voice that filled his head.
“I believe this,” Lucy said. She spoke loudly, making her voice reverberate in the room. “I believe this,” she repeated, her phrase like a fanfare of trumpets or the prescient roll of tympani; now Lucy’s voice was like elephants braying through their lifted trunks, like zebra hooves drumming the plain: “I believe this: As soon as we were human, it was part of our nature and our necessity to create art. It is as essential—art is as essential to our humanness as food or shelter.”
Adam had never before heard her trumpet her belief in anything. He was pleased. Her credo was of creation, if not of the creator.
Father! Adam summoned. Listen to her, Father. Adam thought of his father’s hands, hard and callused, yellowed like horn, with the work of the ranch. His face carved by wind, hardened by the sun. His icy blue eyes. His intolerance for the soft strokes of graphite on soft paper. His disgust.
Finally Arielle asked her father if the prehistoric artists had represented the human form. “They drew all these animals. Did they draw themselves?”
“I’ll show you,” her father answered. A deepness thickened his voice. Like the tolling of a bell, Adam thought, and he shivered. “In two ways, they represented themselves, male and female,” Pierre said darkly.
Pierre led them from under the clatter of hooves and heads past the great black cow falling from her sky. From the domain of the animals, Pierre took them deeper into the raw earth, into one of three openings that branched away from this rotunda like arteries from a heart. The corridor was smooth again because gushing water had once polished its walls. Then the conduit branched, and nodules of flint began to protrude again from the uniform smoothness. Where a side of the wall was ruptured, they stepped across another crevasse into a parallel hall filled with crystalline stalactites and stalagmites. It seemed like a different universe because of their glitter. Adam felt he was walking among stars.
“They were here, too,” Pierre said, and he pointed to the heads and necks of three mountain goats lined up in profile like choristers, and then a tiny little goat, complete and set apart, more detailed and appealing than anything they had seen, but abandoned, created and left near the bottom of a wall, as though to emphasize his small, incidental nature, all by himself. If a child had crawled here, and the spot had been illumined by an adult carrying a stone lamp, the child might have reached out and patted the drawn goat with the palm of his hand.
“I have a friend,” Arielle said, “who draws just like that.” She pointed at the darling goat, drawn so low on the wall.
A red tide of jealousy engulfed Adam. Outside, up there, far away in Paris, in the sunlight, what café, what striped awning, what blue sky did she live under, with artists for friends? The rapid footfalls of fashionably dressed Parisians drummed in his ears. Of course Arielle must be an artist, who lived among other artists.
Their path bent downward, steeply, and Adam felt bewitched by the change in perspective, how if he were sketching this, Pierre’s shoulders and back would be drawn lower on the page to suggest descent.
Stopping beside a cave within the cave—a grotto—Pierre lifted his light to the prone figures of crudely drawn men, falling, pierced with spears or sticks. “Here are the wounded. Not unique. Similar figures—but only single figures—have been found several times in different caves.”
“War,” Adam said.
“‘The Killed Man,’ some have said of the single figures they’ve found. Possibly a sacrificial figure. At Cognac, he also looks just like these men, naked, falling forward, the cleavage of his buttocks rendered but the form left unfinished. No head. The lines for shoulders simply stop.”
Adam thought but did not say: Like the artist, we see him from the back, like those who have thrown the spears. The artist, knowing that we, too, are men, has made us complicit. Adam closed one eye the better to aim. Unaware of arms or legs, Adam’s target was the man’s back.
“And so,” Arielle said, “humans have always killed each other.”
Adam met Lucy’s gaze, and together they thought of F. Riley and of the tortured lamb.
Lucy said, “We must not repeat Cain and Abel billions of times. Sin was the joint failure of Adam and Eve to teach their sons the sacredness of life.”
Adam put his hand on Lucy’s shoulder, remembered the willingness of her flesh, and swallowed tears. He followed the movement of dank cave air through his nostrils and down into his lungs, and smelled the unhealthy rottenness of time. Violence against the body, so pitifully vulnerable, was surely the original human sin. And yet he felt strength and readiness in every fiber of his muscles. Readiness to fight or to love.
“Another image,” Pierre said.
They continued downward in a single file. Straight ahead the corridor came to a dead end. A smooth V-shaped rock hung down like a sharp tooth. With bold black lines an icon of womanhood appeared. Without doubt, the black thatch of lines represented the pubic hair of a woman, and at its center the outline of the open vulva.
“And so,” Lucy said in a sad voice, “from the beginning we women were reduced to this.”
“And we men to killers,” Pierre said. “But this is harder than ‘The Killed Man’ to show you, certainly to show my daughter.” Pierre did not turn his gaze away from the large, hairy, open pubes, but Adam watched him reach out and touch Lucy’s shoulder. Yes, she needed comfort, as much as anyone could give. But she flinched at Pierre’s touch. Adam dared not look at Arielle. Did it come to this? The marks of charcoal gripped in some prehistoric man’s hand were rapid, ugly, ruthless.
Arielle’s voice asked calmly, “Are there other drawings of women, in other caves?”
Her father answered that there were. But they were all like this: five thousand years later, twenty-five thousand years later. What had been drawn to represent women in the days of parietal art was mainly focused on the reproductive female parts.
“I am more than this, Papa,” Arielle said in her pure tones. “We have evolved in our thinking. Some of us, at least.” Her voice, suddenly like her grandfather’s, reminded Adam of a clear stream on a mountainside. “I do not accept this as the image of woman.”
Adam felt depression settle over him. Was his father right to whip the hand that drew a woman reduced to her shaggy crotch? And his own eleven drawings of Lucy? Did he betray the spirit by wanting the body? What was betrayal? After their time in Eden, on the road to Baghdad, in Greece, on the trains, was he betraying Lucy then and now? He thought of Rosalie, the first of his loves, and her apple cheeks. How stirred he had been by the prospect of knowing other girls! And killed men? He winced, remembering the hurt bodies of men he had seen—while he survived.
“This is the wincing place,” Adam said. “The mirror of us—violent and lustful. But the animals they painted were beautiful. To my eye the animals were transcendentally beautiful.” He thought of the majestic elk, a continent of an animal, with its branching rack of antlers.
Pierre picked up a small carved stone, a bulge of hips and breasts, and placed it in his daughter’s hand. “Here she’s a bit more whole, a fuller body and head. Some think they’re fertility symbols perhaps. Not young and lithe, Arielle—but with pendulous breasts and plenty of thickness to her body. A woman after many birthings.”
He put the hard little figure of fecundity back on the cold stone.
“I’ve seen photos of such small statuettes,” he said, “from all over Europe. They’ve been given the names of various kinds of Venuses. The Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Lespugue. Some figures are fashioned from rose quartz. They’re composed almost entirely of a lovely abstracting of curves.”
“If those who named her wanted to claim in a respectful way that she represented fertility, they should have named her Demeter, not Venus,” Lucy replied. “She’s a mother, not a calendar girl. Not a representation of idealized, virginal, inaccessible beauty.”
“Young females,” Pierre said, “are depicted almost like straight sticks—no breasts, but curved behind for the buttocks, sometimes a V scratched on the front.” Adam thought of young girls in jeans walking in the schoolyard. “I’ll show you two more sites,” Pierre said. He sounded tired.
Adam heard the cave make a sound as though it were clearing its throat. Or was it the sound of a single footfall? Perhaps God had walked here in the cave with the artists and breathed over their shoulders as they painted the animals. But Pluto, the rapist, had also guided their hands. Adam himself was tired.
Arielle said that in Germany, in a tar pit, an ancestor of humans much older than the fossil Lucy had been found. A lemurlike creature they had named Ida. And others. Then she asked her father if they would go back the way they came. He answered no, that there was another way out, and it led past other paintings, lovely, inspiring ones. And so they began a long, more gradual ascent.
“Is it a mistake to judge them by our values?” Lucy asked.
“Many men,” Pierre replied, “in our time are ready to kill. Many men see women so crudely. Are we so different from people who lived eons ago?”
No one answered. Adam wiped his forehead, as though he were sweating in the cold cave.
“Two great dangers,” Pierre said. “Violence and the way men view women.”
All the way, as they climbed steadily upward, Adam thought of the first animals they had seen under a veil of calcite: the male deer licking the head of the female, their tender connection. He imagined the free movement of the artist’s whole arm circling to create the sweeping C of antlers, how that movement engendered form and volume on the stone. How the artist’s moving hand had graciously drawn the flick of an animal tongue. But had a woman represented only by her genitals sat nearby posing for the artist, or had he drawn from memory and desire? Adam wished a cave artist had offered a redemptive vision of humanness, an Adam and Eve, rendered fully, with the tenderness of those deer, not the reductive, dark allure of sexuality.
The cave’s corridor fit his shoulders like a cape too heavy to bear. He would walk upward toward openness, remembering the grassy plains spreading around the Garden of Eden, and how the sunshine drenched everything. How he and Lucy had come together in tenderness and respect under the starry sky on the road to Baghdad. He wished they had made love in the sunshine of the open plains of Eden. He thought of the many times he had seen a male wildebeest or graceful gazelle casually mount a female in the daylight. Then walk away. Dumb animals, did he hear his father say?
He thought of Pierre’s library, the essence of civilization, and their own cozy group around its table, of a crimson-black rose that someone whom he did not know had designed for his plate.
He walked a maze of branching memory, but there was a wholeness, a continuity, to the narrative. One foot followed another.
Lucy walked ahead beside Pierre as they moved through the uptilted corridor. Adam found his hand reaching for Arielle’s hand—or had she woven her strong, cold fingers between his? Her hand was abnormally strong and confident. What work had she done with this hand?
He considered the vulnerability of Pierre, ahead of him, safely bundled in a warm jacket and wearing a cap, but how easy it would be to pick up any path-side rock (lying just beyond a stooping down and a reaching out of fingertips), and how easy it would be to hurl that rock into the back of Pierre’s head. Adam pictured himself standing on the ledge of the rock shelter in Mesopotamia and looking out on the world, his own neat pile of stones stacked in a pyramid, like antique cannonballs. He had felt himself lord of all he surveyed, and while Lucy slept and healed, he had gathered an arsenal to defend his domain. That he had hidden the French horn case in the rocks embarrassed him, but every day they had spent together had been essential to their healing happiness.
Pierre flashed his beam on a site where the outlines of animals were drawn, one across another, a great jumble with no attention paid to the relative sizes of the animal; a mammoth was drawn partly inside a bison but also spilling beyond to nudge a lion. Adam saw the outlined shapes of bulls, aurochs, rhinoceroses, and lions piled together like a tangle of wire coat hangers. There was plenty of blank wall space. Why had the artists chosen to pile the outlines together?
There by itself someone had drawn the sloping neck and pointed nose of a bear, and close by, the skull of a real bear sat, as though purposely placed, on a hump of dirt. Pierre pointed to claw marks, great gouges torn into the sides of the corridor, and then he pointed to huge shallow basins, dozens of them, and explained that here giant bears had wallowed and slept through prehistoric winters.
Adam longed for snow, for the pristine whiteness, for both the bright terror and the new beauty of Idaho in winter, but he could not imagine Arielle in the snow. He imagined Pierre’s father, the Sufi, handing him a pad of creamy drawing paper; he wanted to take the Sufi’s hand, to kiss his hornlike fingernails.
Suddenly the two couples turned a corner, and there on the stone wall were beautifully painted horses decorated with spots. Yes, a whimsy of spots, like no real horses ever wore. Pretty spots for all the pretty horses. Surrounding them, blessing them, was a halo of human handprints. Adam heard Lucy’s sharp gasp of pleasure at the handprints from the past, friendly and familiar.
A slight smile curled the two corners of Adam’s mouth, and he knew he was smiling at them, the invisible ancient ones. He smiled at the black-spotted horses and the swarm of vermilion handprints. Adam closed his eyes. When he opened them, the flickering light played again on the stone wall, the horses, and the myriad human handprints wreathed around. Here was joy and fulfillment and connection.
“The charcoal I found here,” Pierre said, “carbon-dated back to forty thousand years ago. Painters blew red pigment through a hollow bone onto and around their hands to leave the prints. Look at the fingers. Their fingers and handprints look exactly like ours.”
When he first awoke in Eden, Adam had crawled to the beach, left his own handprint on the shore in the damp sand. Without touching the prehistoric print, Adam placed his hand so that it hovered just above one left by an artist so many thousands of years before. Their work had lasted.
I am justified.
Adam felt no need to put his hand into the wounds of Christ. For a moment Adam’s hand and spread fingers hovered and trembled, then he closed his fingers and rested his hand beside his thigh.
Finally Pierre said, “Look up.” Above them was painted a small figure of a man, not crudely but with the grace of the animals because he was part animal. The man’s head and shoulders were those of a stag.
“At Les Trois-Frères,” Pierre softly explained, “some people call a similar figure ‘The Sorcerer.’” Pierre sounded exhausted, but he continued. “This image, too, combines features of a man, with the antlers of a stag, and that’s the tail of a horse. His legs look human, and so do his arms. His fingers seem stylized, split like goat hooves, to me.”
Although no one mentioned it, the testicles and penis of the figure hung between his legs but seemed turned backward. The penis was a bold, black, curved line, about to lift itself to straightness.
“His body leans forward,” Pierre said, “like ‘The Killed Man,’ but he has a face, and it is turned toward us. Part man, part animal.”
“The Christ was part man, part god,” Adam said.
“Some church dogma says ‘fully man and fully God,’” Lucy corrected quietly.
“In any case,” Pierre went forward with his thought, “the Sorcerer is part man, part animal. Like the Egyptian gods, but so much older. Being partly animal may give him power and help him transcend human limitations.”
“He’s wearing a mask,” Lucy said, “with eyes on the side like a frog.”
“I think he’s hopping, or jumping,” Arielle said. “The other men were crude stick figures, falling. But see how the calf muscles in his legs are defined. They bulge like ours. He may be dancing. Ekphrastic, art about art. The artist may be depicting the art of dance.”
“He’s looking at us,” Adam added, peering back.