did I find but the simplest, perhaps the first, stone structure of all: a dolmen, the evolutionary ancestor of all European building.
Just outside Livernon I saw a sign for the Dolmen de la Pierre-Martine. For the same reason that Quercy and the Rouergue boast an abundance of old churches they also, not surprisingly, have the market cornered on Stone-Age structures. There is a greater concentration of dolmens, or cromlechs as they’re also known, in this part of southern France than anywhere else in Europe. Quercy has eight hundred dolmens on record; the Rouergue has a thousand, most of them about 4,500 to 3,500 years old. The pursuit of this particular one led me down a farm track of such beauty that my throat ached. The grey, dry-stone walls had fallen into lavender shadow, behind which branches of scrub oak, roughly interlaced, made shard-patterns of the sky. Bells sounded as ponies bent down to graze.
The dolmen wasn’t much to look at; two of its supporting slabs had been reinforced with concrete to render its massive capstone perfectly flat. A dog’s leash lay on top, domesticating the tomb by association. It looked more like a picnic table than the skeleton of a prehistoric gravesite once filled with human bones (the horizontal and vertical megaliths originally would have been covered with earth, forming a tumulus). I taped my bit of limestone on it and tried to recall when I’d first begun to think about stone. My name, Petro, means ‘stone’ in Greek, and my father has collected gems and minerals since I was a child. But it was only when I was about forty that I began to suspect that my lithic adventures in life – dolmen hunting in a beat-up Renault in Portugal, toting dinosaur footprints to school as a child, a yen to build dry-stone walls – might add up to more than casual appreciation.
Shortly after my fortieth birthday I’d found myself crouching in a cave in Tuscany, inspecting an Etruscan relief carving of a faceless woman, her legs impossibly splayed outward like wings. A leaflet told me that she was a ‘mermaid with two tails’. I recognized her as a fertility goddess. I touched her shin, entranced. The other visitors wandered off, but an elderly Italian guide lingered behind. ‘You love this,’ he said in halting English, taking my hand and pressing it against the stone.
Over the next months it occurred to me that he was right. I didn’t just love Romanesque sculpture, I loved stone itself. Dogs may be our best friends, but stone is our most steadfast companion. It accepts whatever we find significant – our scratchings and carvings, our borings and borrowings – and remembers them far longer than we do until, like this dolmen, they become secrets. I trusted the mute companionship of stones, their testament to ancient lives and even older weather, and, especially, their humbling perspective. Compared to us, stones are immortal.
The only hotel in Livernon, a shifty-looking place, was closed, so I drove on to the much larger town of Figeac, not far from the Rouergue border. Venerable, mottled sycamore trees and neon advertisements lined streets crammed with rush-hour traffic. I could see a string of old hotels with lovely terraces on the far embankment overlooking the River Lot. In the forty-five minutes it took to travel three blocks to a bridge and cross the river, not a single parking space was left to be had. I bolted out of town in desperation, as fast as the Friday evening crush would permit, and fled south.
The ample croplands of the Lot Valley didn’t last long. Soon I was climbing, switch-backing up atop a high ridge, which gave onto the open, scrubby moors of the Causse de Limogne, another limestone plateau just south of that of Gramat. I bellowed out of the car window into the greying emptiness, noisy with relief. It was refreshing to find feral lands in France, where the trees aren’t pruned or planted in neat rows – an antidote to Gallic cultivation, in every sense of the word.
The next town I came to was called Cajarc, an old market village around an open square, which had been strung with coloured lights. I found a parking space in front of a café that also proved to be a hotel; inside, the owner-chef and his family were eating dinner before customers arrived. His wife jumped up when I walked in, letting the ladle she’d been gripping fall with a plop, handle first, into a big white tureen. There was a long moment in which no one seemed to move, or breathe, the air still as art. In the time it took to swallow, the impression vanished. The woman retrieved her spoon with a good-natured shrug, wiped the soup off her hand, and showed me to a room at the back.
A stairway led to seven second-storey rooms opening off an exterior corridor. She presented one and left me with a key, and I went back to the car to retrieve my suitcase. When I returned I’d forgotten which of the identical, numberless doors was mine. The fourth one, I thought, so I tried the key; it fitted, and I walked in. I had a moment’s deep dread – the rucksack I’d left was gone – before I decided, calmly, that this was simply the wrong room. I tried the fifth door, which also opened to my key but which was also empty; then the sixth, with the same result. With growing concern of several kinds I marched back to the third door, certain my key would work, and threw it open: inside a startled man in a wide-brimmed hat was placing a large bamboo staff against the wall. A different rucksack entirely, bound with a large scallop shell attached to a cord, sat on the bed. I apologized in embarrassment-addled French, and tried the second door, certain it couldn’t possibly be mine. It was.
All night long – a fluorescent light had glared directly outside the frosted glass door to my room, preventing measurable sleep – I amused myself with game-show scenarios presented by my skeleton key. Behind door number one lay this! Behind door number two lay that! Behind door number three stood – a pilgrim!
We met again at breakfast. ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ he greeted me. ‘Je suis un pèlerin.’ So you are, I thought.
He’d been driven to conversation with me because the locals – a fearsome pack of middle-aged men drinking strong coffee and beer at the bar, grunting to one another from their gullets – had confiscated the newspaper he had been reading while he’d gone to pick up his staff, which had fallen with a clatter. In between bites of local peach jam spread on a baguette, he told me he was walking the entire pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. My eyes widened in honour. ‘In pieces, Madame,’ he specified. ‘I shall get no medal for speed. Last fall I walked from Le Puy en Velay to Conques in ten days. Now, this spring, I am walking from Conques to Moissac. I give my feet a rest in summer and winter. There are whole peach-halves in this confiture,’ he concluded, fishing one out of the pot with a spoon.
I wished him well. I had guessed he was a pilgrim on account of his outfit – a wide-brimmed hat and staff have been pilgrimage accoutrements since the Middle Ages – and because Cajarc lies on one of the branches of the great pilgrimage way. There are four principal routes of spiritual drainage across France, all of which converge in the Pyrenees. One route begins in Paris and travels through Tours and Bordeaux; another starts at Vézelay in Burgundy – home of my Pig-Snouted Ethiopians – and continues through Limoges and Périgueux; a third takes the southernmost route, starting in Arles and winding through Montpellier and Toulouse; and the last one, called the Via Podiensis, sets out where my friend began, at Le Puy en Velay in the Massif Central, and passes through Espalion, Conques, Figeac, Cajarc, Cahors and Moissac. The Via Podiensis is also known as the GR 65, ‘GR’ standing for Grande Randonnée, one of France’s meticulously well-marked, long-distance hiking paths, a map of which the Cajarc pilgrim had spread on his breakfast table in lieu of the missing newspaper.
So many well-trodden routes converging on one place suggest a very great destination at the end, and so Compostela was, and is yet. The allure began when the Apostle James, or in Spanish, Santiago, appeared to Charlemagne in a dream in which he revealed the location of his body, inconveniently buried in infidel-occupied Spain. Charlemagne tried to beat back the Moors, but failed; after Galicia was freed nearly two centuries later, pilgrims began flocking to James’s tomb in Compostela. There were other pilgrimage options for medieval travellers as well, Jerusalem being the holiest, but also the farthest; Rome was next in line of importance, with the bodies of two saints, Peter and Paul; after that, Compostela was the only other site in Europe to boast an entire Apostle (other churches had bits and pieces in reliquaries, but they didn’t match the glamour of an intact corpse whose owner had actually walked with Christ).
The Compostela pilgrimage was enthusiastically promoted by French abbots, who welcomed the revenue and prestige brought by masses of pilgrims travelling through French territory, not to mention the opportunity