Song of the Sea Maid (18 page)

The sea is much calmer than the day I went before, and Horacio is able to moor safely. I leap out on to a narrow platform among the craggy rocks of the tiny islet.

‘Careful!’ he shouts.

I brush away his fussing and hoist my bag over my shoulder. Inside are paper, pencils and pastels for recording anything I might see, as well as a tinderbox and candle lantern for lighting my way. If the cave is deep, it will be dark in there. I hitch up my skirts to begin the climb up the path. Oh, for breeches! I must ask Horacio to get me a pair, a boy’s perhaps, due to my small frame. I do not know if he has settled down to sleep in the sun or is following me, and I do not care. I have my eyes up and ahead on the entrance to my cave. All along the path the rocks are encrusted with fossils – every kind of spiralling mollusc, domed shellfish and even the odd whiskery fish have been caught there in perpetuity.

I reach the mouth of the cave and stop in wonder. There on the walls are paintings, drawn in two colours – black like charcoal and a kind of reddish brown: they are fish, countless black-outlined fish with red gills and eyes, swirling and swimming over every lump and bump in the undulating cave wall. I see that some fish have been created from the natural shapes present in the wall itself, as if the artist stood, looked at the cave and saw the fish there in the mind’s eye and used the pigment to fill in what the imagination had already created. They swim across the entrance to the cave, up over the arch and down the other side.

I drop my bag, light my lantern and step cautiously further into the cave. I can see that the entrance veers off to one side, and it does look like a deep and winding cave, perhaps with rooms further in, holding who knows what treasures. I touch the walls and as I move away from the roaring of the sea I see whiteness and feel wetness there; it is moonmilk, the milky substance that can at times be found on cave walls. Here and there the walls are drier and a colourless, transparent mineral has formed: ancient layers of crystalline rock. I reach the end of the entrance room and the beginning of a tunnel. On the left of this pathway sits a rock and atop it has been placed an animal skull. It has a long beak and at first I think it is a monstrous bird, but then I decide it may well be the head of a porpoise, complete with tiny teeth all the way along its ‘beak’. The cave ceiling has dripped down on this skull for centuries, perhaps millennia, and the skull is encased in minerals to create a shimmering white sculpture. It seems no accident to have been placed there. It is like a welcome, or a warning.

I proceed, scanning the ceiling for more paintings, but there are none along this narrow passage, and I fear the fish are all I will find, as they were near the entrance and the natural light. Perhaps early people had no way of lighting such deep, dark places. As the tunnel narrows further, I feel the fear of any animal trapped in an enclosed space and my feet slow. The tunnel twists once more and the roof is low. I bend to crouch through and then in a moment I am surrounded by space and chill air. I stand, lift my lantern and gasp.

I am in a majestic cavern glittering with stalactites and stalagmites. Some have dripped down over so many years they have joined together in mighty colonnades. The floor is uneven with hundreds of bones and shells, more porpoise skulls placed in rows beside the walls, and to the right a pile of flattened pieces of stone with a depression in each, all shaped similarly, all placed carefully together, as if they represent a store of some precious object. I crunch across the floor as though tramping through a million eggshells, lifting my lamp high, and at the far reach of this cavern I see the lines of more paint gleaming on the walls. I stumble over there and see paintings of pointed ovals, striped all along and at one end of each oval a rounded head with an eye and upturned mouth. They are seals, unmistakably; and they are smiling. There are many of them, some painted in red-brown, some in white, overlapping each other expertly. The artists must have planned this scene, to break the line of each animal behind the next, to give the impression of depth, of an entire underwater herd of them; for they are swimming, not lying on the shore fat and ungainly, but sinewy and graceful. From the flickering of candle flame, the seals themselves seem to flex and move, and I can see these ancient artists – who surely must have had their own source of light to create this mural, perhaps a simple fiery torch held in the hand – will have seen the same as me, that the lambent shadows of the flame throw movement into these painted animals and make them weave and swim before your eyes. The seals congregate around another opening, a further pathway that leads deeper into the cavern, and so far from the entrance am I now, that without my lamp I would be in authentic blackness.

Down deeper into the cave I go, the walls glistening with moonmilk – silence, the sea acres away – in this inky darkness cocooned in thick rock walls older than time. There is one more cavern here, a final one, as there are no more paths leading from it; the belly of the beast. It is like a secret chapel, with its domed roof. And here is the most spectacular display of all: a hall of red-brown figures, stretching across every surface: women with floating hair, plump rounded breasts, wide hips that taper down to no feet – instead into the tails of fish. Swimming in the sea across the ceiling, dozens of them, some with children, also fish-tailed, grasping on to their mothers’ long tresses for anchorage; some are clearly pregnant, their ripe bellies uppermost. I see more of them holding fish in their hands, some thrusting the fish between their teeth. Now I find some sitting on rocks, a pile of opened shellfish beside them: some are eating the mussels and oysters there, I can even see their tongues poking into the shells to retrieve the meat. There is one figure, larger than the rest, seated on a rock with white pigment streaming from her breasts, her arms outspread in welcome, surrounded by a complex design of fish, seals, shellfish and infants. Yet look down her full thighs and there is no fish tail, but human legs, like mine, and feet placed firmly on the ground. I look more closely at the figures surrounding her and I find some of them – particularly the children – have feet rather than tails; with some each foot is webbed, like a frog’s toes. The great female herself has perfect human toes, no joining or webbing, no suggestion of fish or a sea mammal. And there above her head, the same symbol etched here in black that I have seen on the bone in my hut: the circle with a line drawn halfway down it from the edge to the centre; there are many of them here, all around the head of the mer-woman. Her face is turned to the left in profile, her mouth open as if speaking, and then I see the pattern in the chaos, that the figures surrounding her emanate from this point, that the swirl of sea life and mer-mothers and their babes issues from her lips, as if the whole picture is her song.

I examine each cavern in turn, from the deepest to the cave entrance. I sketch what I see and in looking closely, find more and more than I had noticed at first. Beside cracks in the cave wall in the deepest recesses of each cavern, there are handprints outlined in red – it looks as if each artist has placed a hand on the wall as a stencil then spurted paint perhaps from a reed on to the hand, leaving a trace around it. I hold my own hand up to many of these ancient prints and find my hand is of a very similar size. There are some much smaller, which must be the hands of children. Some of these are found very high up the cave wall, above my reach, which suggests an adult held the child while another painted its hand. None of the hands I see are much bigger than my own. Perhaps these people were smaller than modern humans. Or perhaps only women painted their hands and those of their children. Or is it possible that only women painted all these pictures, the fish, the seals and the mermaids? And then it strikes me: I have not seen one image of a male human anywhere in these caves. I look again to search for some swimming males in the cave of the figures, but there are none, not one. And it occurs to me now that the repeated shape I saw above the head of the great sea maid is anatomical; it is female, the sex of a woman.

In these caves, I have lost track of all time and might have been in here for hours. My stomach groans with hunger and I think I have stayed long past luncheon. I resolve to go out to reassure Horacio, but I am loath to leave. On my slow way back, I collect a few objects. There are fish bones and more skulls – those of porpoises and what may be seals, and more shells of many shapes. I collect one of the plates from the pile, as well as other stones from near to it, which seem worked in some way, chipped and formed into what looks like the head of a spear; I find some items made from bone, a kind of spoon perhaps, and a prong that could work like a fork and pierce meat; and here a small vessel, from which one might take a sip of water.

I have knelt for so long, scrabbling around on the floor, that when I stand, my legs have gone to sleep and I stumble, dropping my lamp and extinguishing the flame. The tinder box is in my bag in the cave entrance. I am left in the cave of the seals alone in utter blackness. I stop and a chill creeps upon me. I have the sensation I am being watched. Ancient eyes are turned on me, curious, wary. My scientific mind takes over and forces one foot in front of the next. Scrabbling about, I find my lamp. I reach out and feel my way along the wall with my one free hand. I can discern lines in the cave wall I had not noticed by sight – long curving lines in sets of three – they feel as if they were done in the moonmilk with the middle three fingers of the hand, then left to dry and set in the rock over the years. I follow these flutings; they lead me out of the seal cavern and into the long passage. They run, at shoulder height, in swirls and patterns, yet leading me on and on, to the cave entrance, and the light.

As I step along towards the first cave, I notice more markings I had not spotted before, as they are in muted red and very subtle. They are so faint, as they are half-hidden behind a sheen of crystal, as if the rock itself had grown over them for thousands of years. They are dots, spots of pigment just above head height, arranged in patterns. There are rows of three dots, one above the other. Here, there is a faint outline of a box, with two dots inside it. There, a series of short lines side by side, like tally marks. At first, their positioning seems arbitrary, but then each configuration is placed beside a crack in the wall and follows its progress, like the handprints in the other caves. There is method here, sophistication, deep thought; more than an impulse merely to make a mark. I step out into the cave mouth and blink, blinded by the afternoon sun. I hear Horacio calling me, but I cannot fathom his words as I am not present, I am not myself; I am standing at the edge of a cave once inhabited by ancient ancestors, standing where they stood, seeing what they saw, and it fills my vision: the sea, the sea, the sea.

Now that I have made my spectacular find, I know what my purpose here must be. I attempt to persuade Horacio to travel to Berlenga Grande more often; indeed, if it were my choice, I’d have him convey me to my caves every day! Yet, we agree a compromise and throughout September and October he takes me there once a week. He is not interested in its contents; he tells me there are piles of ancient things scattered all over the coast near Peniche and he has no curiosity for them, they are only old junk. I spend each day fully in the cave, sketching and collecting artefacts. I arrange for my collections to be boxed and sent back to England. There are other curiosities in the cave I had not noticed at first: on some of the walls I find black scuffs and fragments of coal; it seems a torch was scraped there, to rekindle the flame. Were these later visitors to the site, or the original inhabitants? There are also small mounds of stones, not fallen from the ceiling, but collected by ancient hands and placed in ceremonial heaps, yet why they are there is a riddle lost in time. I study the flattened pieces of stone with a depression at the end of each one, and think and think of what purpose they may serve. I surmise I may have solved it: such things may have been primitive oil lamps, with the depression serving to hold the oil in which a wick would be laid. This would explain how such detailed work could be carried out, sometimes clearly using both hands, without the need for constantly holding a torch. It is conceivable.

In the long evenings in my hut, sometimes I come outside, wrap my shawl about my shoulders and walk up to the point where I can see the cave islet in the distance. I stare out to it and think about the people who painted it, who collected skulls and stones in it, who carried their lamps into the darkness and created beauty. Or is it more than that, a kind of message, for such as me, for their descendants, for the future? There are the fish first, then the seals, then the cave of figures – half female, half fish: the hybrid beings with webbed feet, all ruled over by one whole woman, wide-hipped and milky-breasted, a goddess of fecundity. And as I have observed, there are no men on these walls, not one; it is a triptych of the sea and only the women who came from it. Whatever can it all mean?

But I cannot stay to study these marvels for much longer. It is nearly the end of October and Horacio warns me that the weather turns much colder in the next month and is particularly unpredictable on these islands. Soon it will be too cold to sleep in the hut. I hate to leave, but I know I must. My benefactor agreed to six months only, and I must obey, this first trip at least. I plan to return to Peniche, take all my things with me, and work on my thesis at Dona da Seda’s quiet guest-house for the remainder of my stay, with a brief trip to Lisbon for supplies first. I have to go myself as I would like to purchase a microscope, if one can be found in the city, and I do not trust any postal service to deliver safely such a precious item. I wish to understand the smallest marine animals, to complement my studies of coral and other life of the sea. I can also spend my days in search of ancient artefacts in Peniche and round about, if the country is cluttered with old things, as Horacio complains. And to examine the flora and fauna of the area, and compare it with the islands’ life, take tiny creatures from the sea lapping the beaches of Peniche and study them under my microscope. It will be good to have some company again besides the screeching seabirds and distant soldiers of the Berlengas;
there have been times when I grow maudlin in my hut and think on my lonely childhood and my lost brother and never-known parents and I hug myself and long for something. Yes, it will be good to return to civilisation for a time, even if it is only the taciturn company of Dona da Seda. I will write up my findings, adapt them into a kind of narrative that any reader can understand. Then back to England on the
Prospect
at the end of January. Back to wintry, smoky, foggy London. From there, to tell the world about my cave, perhaps? But only once I have decided what it all means.