Yet they could paint up on the walls what they thought, too.  There are likewise whole screeds of symbols waiting, perhaps waiting for ever, to be interpreted.  The dots and lines and pothooks clearly belong to a system of picture-writing.  Can we make out their meaning at all?  Once in a way, perhaps.  Note these marks looking like two different kinds of throwing-club; at any rate, there are Australian weapons not unlike them.  To the left of them are a lot of dots in what look like patterns, amongst which we get twice over the scheme of one dot in the centre of a circle of others.  Then, farther still to the left, comes the painted figure of a bison; or, to be more accurate, the front half is painted, the back being a piece of protruding rock that gives the effect of low relief.  The bison is rearing back on its haunches, and there is a patch of red paint, like an open wound, just over the region of its heart.  Let us try to read the riddle.  It may well embody a charm that ran somewhat thus:  “With these weapons, and by these encircling tactics, may we slay a fat bison, O ye powers of the dark!” Depend upon it, the men who went half a mile into the bowels of a mountain, to paint things up on the walls, did not do so merely for fun.  This is a very eerie place, and I daresay most of us would not like to spend the night there alone; though I know a pre-historian who did.  In Australia, as we shall see later on, rock-paintings of game-animals, not so lifelike as these of the old days, but symbolic almost beyond all recognizing, form part of solemn ceremonies whereby good hunting is held to be secured.  Something of the sort, then, we may suppose, took place ages ago in the cave of Niaux.  So, indeed, it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carven pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, the shining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful lamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heart in a grander one.

Space would fail me if I now sought to carry you off to the cave of Altamira, near Santander, in the north-west of Spain.  Here you might see at its best a still later style of rock-painting, which deserts mere black and white for colour-shading of the most free description.  Indeed, it is almost too free, in my judgment; for, though the control of the artist over his rude material is complete, he is inclined to turn his back on real life, forcing the animal forms into attitudes more striking than natural, and endowing their faces sometimes, as it seems to me, with almost human expressions.  Whatever may be thought of the likelihood of these beasts being portrayed to look like men, certain it is that in the painted caves of this period the men almost invariably have animal heads, as if they were mythological beings, half animal and half human; or else—­as perhaps is more probable—­masked dancers.  At one place, however—­namely, in the rock shelter of Cogul near Lerida, on the Spanish