The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
route, why don’t we make it a triangle: south to St Cyprien, east to Lunel, northwest back to Conques?’
Her triangle seemed logical enough – I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. We set off in a shower of church bells, not at the crack of dawn, but at a civilized mid-morning hour after an open-air breakfast attended by flies. I’d vouched for the coffee, but Annie had insisted on having tea.
Our route descended along a narrow, writhing lane from the car park outside the village, where all non-local cars must be stabled, to the main road to St Cyprien alongside the Dourdou. Healthy cornstalks rustled in the wind like conspirators. Annie, the inveterate gardener, identified flora: yellow evening primrose, coral-coloured campsis vines, which grew amidst sandstone outcrops the shade of old wine stains. I pocketed a piece of schist I’d been kicking along. We were too early for dégustation of the local Marcillac in St Cyprien, an incurious little town in the flatbed of the river valley, where residents were going about their morning business along the solitary shopping street. Here we turned east through a two-block suburbia until the houses were overtaken by cornfields.
Above us loomed the causse. ‘Ah, we’ve a climb ahead,’ said Annie lustily, shaking off a passing shower and striding uphill in her hiking boots. I, in my trainers, eyed the rising ground with trepidation. It’s an established fact of our friendship that Annie is hearty; I am less so. The ground rose with a vengeance. About halfway up to the causse, St Cyprien now pocket-sized below us, we came upon a sandstone farmhouse and its outbuildings, all topped with fanciful pavilion roofs covered in schist lauzes. Geraniums and roses outlined the courtyard.
I couldn’t believe the name: La Carrière. ‘It means ‘‘The Quarry’’,’ I translated to Annie, who can’t speak a word of French and doesn’t see this as a defect in the least. Glorious confirmation, it was, to find a thousand-year-old memory ringing in a name. Better yet, just opposite, on the rising hillside, was a geological event that took my breath away.
‘Stand there, stand there!’ I gasped to Annie, pulling out my camera. She finger-combed her blonde hair and smiled. ‘No, no, not you.’ She frowned. ‘Point to the rock and make sure you don’t get in the way.’
Annie pointed and I took a photograph of Ste Foy’s abbey in the rough, before it had become an idea shaped by man. Here on the road to Lunel, like two big animals lying together for warmth, the red sandstone of the lowland met the yellow limestone of the causse. Together their limy run-off turned hydrangea flowers pink rather than blue in the valley below. We could easily see the frontier between the two kinds of bedrock; the line was perpendicular to the ground but tilted precipitously on its axis. It made me shudder. What kind of tectonic chaos, how many millions of years of upheaval, erosion, unimaginable pressure, and more upheaval, had it taken to thrust primeval sea bed and board into this position? Like the masons’ achievement at Conques, this was another union of stone, telling a not-dissimilar story of genesis, death, and rebirth. It was a cycle that had been repeated over and over throughout the 4.55 billion years of pre-history; a cycle still in progress; a cycle given human form and a name in the silent stories of the abbey’s New Testament sculptures.
My compatriot, Henry David Thoreau, said that the Christian notion of looking for God in heaven, literally above our heads, prevents us from understanding that heaven is really here on earth, in the rock beneath our feet. For Thoreau, spirituality lay in the wonders of nature. But I felt its sudden, nascent spark in an interstice, in the tug of kinship between this cliff face and the Abbey of Ste Foy, and that kinship both thrilled and comforted me. Perhaps the two weren’t so different after all.
‘It’s called an angular unconformity,’ I announced.
‘And this,’ said Annie, pointing at a lacy, lavender flower, ‘is called scabious. And that is purple heather. It’s like you – it loves limestone.’
We continued climbing. Handkerchief vineyards clung to the upslope, walnut groves to the down. Without warning Annie became frighteningly high-minded and began quoting from George Herbert’s poem ‘The Pulley’. First she set the stage.
‘God, you see, makes man and then pours out for him a cupful of riches, all but contentment, which he leaves sloshing around in the bottom. Here’s the bit I can remember:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottome lay.
For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.
Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessnesse …
She launched that eyebrow at me. I’d thought she hadn’t been paying attention, and now she was reducing the ambiguities of my pilgrimage – and the fount of Kingsley’s wanderlust – to ten lines. Thankfully we’d reached the final, banked curve of the climb and stood at last on the causse. A metallic-tasting wind tossed away our sweat. ‘Where is it?’
I had promised Annie a dolmen. Ahead of us stretched a bumpy blanket of pastures and wheat fields, neatly separated by dark windbreaks. Lunel lay a mile or two down the road. I pointed in that direction.
It was cold now, and we walked with our heads bowed to avoid the wind. Our lunch by the roadside was a brief and chilly affair: an apple and a squashed nectarine, Quaker oatmeal bars I’d brought from home, and two thick slabs of Laguiole cheese from the Aubrac – rough, Rouergat highlands to the east. The cheese tasted like the rind of a fresh Camembert, a young, new taste, but with a supple texture; we ate it atop pilfered slices of baguette from breakfast. Shortly after lunch we came upon the great prehistoric hunks of granite. The dolmen sat next to the macadam encircled by a little gravel drive, giving the impression of a caged beast in a zoo. Annie prowled around it.
‘It’s a wonder to behold.’
‘Don’t make fun of the dolmen.’
‘Perhaps it was made by quite short people.’
At 5 foot 9, she was a good foot taller than the capstone. I had to admit it did look like a very large, mottled mushroom. Hannah Green, however, had been enamoured. She reported its Occitan name, La Peira-Levada, the Raised Stone, and said that a ring of menhirs had once stood nearby. She also wrote that the Celts believed dolmens to be meeting places where the living conferred with the dead, and that they became sites of pilgrimage. The fact that I can’t confirm this is what makes dolmens so wonderful – no one knows much about them, least of all their original or, in the Celts’ case, even secondary significance. Dolmens aren’t ruins; unlike weathered Romanesque carvings, it is their stories, not their shapes, that have eroded away.
And that’s fine. We need to forget in order to invent. Dolmens, too, offer a handshake to the human imagination.
‘Looks like a beached whale,’ remarked Annie. ‘By the by, dare I ask about this quarry of yours?’
I had been anticipating this moment. ‘Well, you see, there is no quarry per se, at least not any more.’ Up went the eyebrow. ‘It was filled in ages ago. But the exact site doesn’t really matter. We’re in Lunel; we know there was a quarry somewhere nearby. This is the place the abbey stone called home. Ancestors of those stone-hatches you just identified for me probably knew it as neighbours.’
Annie snorted good-naturedly as fast clouds patterned the fields with moving shadows. The little village of Lunel was entirely built of rousset – it looked like Conques’ little sister. Kind-eyed cattle the colour of dark caramel, Aubrac cattle, populated the adjacent fields. Here we turned around; the next day we would follow the same route in my car, taking twenty minutes to do what today had taken hours. We retraced our steps for about half a mile before heading off on a new track – the GR 62, a southern tributary of the Chemin de St Jacques – back toward