Eamon Grennan

Holding only a handful of rushlight they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch until the great rock chamber flowered around them and they stood in an enormous womb of flickering light and darklight, a place to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows over the sleeker shapes of radiance. They've left the world of weather and panic behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark in their wake, pushing as one pulse to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries and the binding juices oozed out of chosen barks. The beasts begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts (soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white) stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours mould those forms from chance, coaxing rigid dips and folds and bulges to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches, a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes curling to a crazy gallop. Intent and human, they attach the mineral, vegetable, animal realms to themselves, inscribing the one unbroken line everything depends on, from that impenetrable centre to the outer intangibles of light and air, even the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc of gentleness that this big-bellied cow arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing dance of death that bristles out of the buck's struck flank. On this one line they leave a beak-headed human figure of sticks and one small, chalky, human hand. We'll never know if they worked in silence like people praying—the way our monks illuminated their own dark ages in cross-hatched rocky cloisters, where they contrived a binding labyrinth of lit affinities to spell out in nature's lace and fable their mindful, blinding sixth sense of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds tracing their great bloodlines over the globe) they kept a constant gossip up of praise, encouragement, complaint. It doesn't matter: we know they went with guttering rushlight into the dark; came to terms with the given world; must have had —as their hands moved steadily by spiderlight—one desire we'd recognise: they would—before going on beyond this border zone, this nowhere that is now here—leave something upright and bright behind them in the dark.