Simon

It was cold in the cave – numbingly, bitingly cold; and dark – as dark as death.

I had walked through the bush – ponga, mamaku, hinau, rimu, moss – and crawled on my elbows into a small hole in a bank. One might not even have noticed it there in the lush vegetation.

Through that liminal hole was a different world to be explored – huge caverns, tiny passages, cliffs, columns, iron stalagmites.

2017: ‘My mum was put on a train,’ Simon Coencas said. It was 77 years since his mum was put on a train.

In 1940, Simon had crawled on his elbows into a small hole in a bank in the Vézère Valley. His friend’s dog had found the hole and it led to – the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory: caverns covered in the greatest artistic creations of humanity – horses and buffaloes and star charts painted 20,000 years before – the caves of Lascaux; art so powerful that those boys, Simon and his friends, stood before them hot with extraordinary emotion, the first people to see those sublime works for twenty millennia.

Simon must have held that vision in his heart when he was in the ‘sorting camp’. He was released because he was under the age of 16. ‘My mum was put on a train’ – a train to the chimney smoke of Auschwitz.

… though the light has come into the world, people have preferred darkness to the light because their deeds were evil.

And indeed, everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being exposed;

but whoever lives by the truth comes out into the light so that it may be plainly seen that what he does is done in God.

It was cold in the cave.

A scree slope led down to the pool. The water flowed into that pool from a fissure in the wall – mandorla, vesica piscis, almond. I waded across and into the crevice. The walls were rough enough and the passage narrow enough so that I could perch a foot on either wall and so avoid getting jammed in the narrow bottom.

The water roared through about waist deep.

By this time I was 45 minutes from the surface.

Half way down the passage, there – sitting on a rock rising from the roiling water – caught by the light of my lamp: a green, jewel-like frog, still and contemplative as a tiny Buddha.

Since Simon’s grandchildren were born, 122 species of frog have become extinct, a third of all species are threatened – just another tiny part of the Anthropocene Extinction, only the sixth mass-extinction in over four billion years: our fleeting and universally destructive lifetime.

But deep in that cave, the delicate skin of its tiny throat slowly pulsing, sits that frog.

Barnaby McBryde