Now let us take our lamps and explore the secrets of the interior.  The icy torrents that hollowed it in the limestone have eaten away rounded alcoves along the sides.  On the white surface of these, glazed over with a preserving film of stalactite, we at once notice the outlines of many hands.  Most of them left hands, showing that the Aurignacians tended to be right-handed, like ourselves, and dusted on the paint, black manganese or red ochre, between the outspread fingers in just way that we, too, would find convenient.  Curiously enough, this practice of stencilling hands upon the walls of caves is in vogue amongst the Australian natives; though unfortunately, they keep the reason, if there is any deeper one than mere amusement, strictly to themselves.  Like the Australians, again, and other rude peoples, these Aurignacians would appear to have been given to lopping off an occasional finger—­from some religious motive, we may guess—­to judge from the mutilated look of a good many of the handprints.

The use of paint is here limited to this class of wall-decoration.  But a sharp flint makes an excellent graving tool; and the Aurignacian hunter is bent on reproducing by this means the forms of those game-animals about which he doubtless dreams night and day.  His efforts in this direction, however, rather remind us of those of our infant-schools.  Look at this bison.  His snout is drawn sideways, but the horns branch out right and left as if in a full-face view.  Again, our friend scamps details such as the legs.  Sheer want of skill, we may suspect, leads him to construct what is more like the symbol of something thought than the portrait of something seen.  And so we wander farther and farther into the gloomy depths, adding ever new specimens to our pre-historic menagerie, including the rare find of a bird that looks uncommonly like the penguin.  Mind, by the way, that you do not fall into that round hole in the floor.  It is enormously deep; and more than forty cave-bears have left their skeletons at the bottom, amongst which your skeleton would be a little out of place.

Next day let us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see another cave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by former glaciers.  This cave is about a mile deep; and it will take you half a mile of awkward groping amongst boulders and stalactites, not to mention a choke in one part of the passage such as must puzzle a fat man, before the cavern becomes spacious, and you find yourself in the vast underground cathedral that pre-historic man has chosen for his picture-gallery.  This was a later stock, that had in the meantime learnt how to draw to perfection.  Consider the bold black and white of that portrait of a wild pony, with flowing mane and tail, glossy barrel, and jolly snub-nosed face.  It is four or five feet across, and not an inch of the work is out of scale.  The same is true of nearly every one of the other fifty or more figures of game-animals.  These artists could paint what they saw.