Such an ancient abode of men is to be found at Mentone, at a spot called, in the local speech, the Baoussé-Roussé. The English would term the place the Red Cliff. The Red Cliff is just beyond the tragical looking chasm, with its babyish stream, that marks the frontier of France. It stands, therefore, in Italy. It is a formidable cliff of great height, as erect as a wall, as defiant as a Titanic bastion. It rises sheer from the rugged beach and is as old as the sea. It has been scraped smooth by the wind of a million years, and may have been once scoured clean by the rain of Noah’s deluge. It is bare of vegetation, except that, here and there, a pitying weed, lavish with yellow blossoms, clings tenderly to its scarred surface. About its foot are a few palms, a tall aloe, and some bushes with scarlet flowers. The colour of the cliff is a tawny grey, stained with red of the tint of ancient rust. There are long seams, too, on its surface which suggest the wrinkles of extreme old age.
At the bottom of the precipice are certain caverns which were once the abodes of men. These caves are about nine in number; so that at one time the Red Cliff must have been quite a little town, for the caverns are capacious. The entrances to the caves are, for the most part, in the form of huge clefts in the rock from twenty feet to sixty feet high. They face towards the south, so that at noon a streak of light can penetrate into the vast stone hall and illumine its floor. When the sun has passed each portal becomes no more than a black gap in the precipice, very mysterious to look upon.
The people who inhabited these caves belong to our earliest known ancestors. They stand at the root of the family tree. They represent the Adam and Eve of human history. Behind these people stretches the void of the unknown. It is in their likeness that the first human being steps out of the everlasting darkness into the light of the present world.
MENTONE: A DOORWAY IN THE RUE LONGUE.
They are known as the Pal?olithic folk—the cavern people, the men and women of the rough Stone Age. Their finest implements and most cunning weapons were of unpolished flint. They had a knowledge of fire. These two possessions express the meagre progress they had made in the march of civilisation.
There are certain skeletons of these cliff-folk in the Museum at Monaco. It is a memorable moment when one first has sight of men who were alive some 50,000 years ago, and who, after interminable centuries, have just come again into the light of day and the company of their kind. It is at least—in the records of the human family—a curious meeting, a meeting rendered almost dramatic when one sees a dainty French lady in the mode of 1920 peering through a glass case into the face of an ancestor who walked the shores of France in an age so remote as to be almost mythical.
There is an impression with some that these people of long ago were brutish creatures, ape-like and uncouth, being little more, in fact, than gorillas with a leaven of human craft. The Red Cliff skeletons, however, are not the skeletons of brutes. They show, on the contrary, the characteristic features of the bones of the man and woman of modern times. Such differences as exist are slight. There are the same straight back, the broad shoulders, the well-balanced head, the finely proportioned limbs, the delicate feet and hands. This skeleton of a Red Cliff man might have been that of a modern athlete, but with a muscular development that the modern would envy; while this shapely woman, from the depths of a cave, might have graced in life the enclosure at Ascot. There are some peculiarities in the shinbone, but I doubt if they would be noticeable even through a silk stocking. The skull is different, the face is flat, the nose broad, the forehead low, the jaws prominent. From the Ascot standpoint it must be allowed that the cave folk had ugly faces, coarse and unintellectual no doubt, but not the aspect of the gorilla.
Among the skeletons from the colony at Mentone is one of especial interest. It is that of an old woman whose body was found in the deepest part of the cavern, and who, therefore, may be assumed to have belonged to the earliest or most ancient of the inhabitants. She is perfectly and, indeed, finely formed. Her age would be about seventy. It is to be noted incidentally that the bones show no evidences of gross rheumatic changes nor of other disabling trouble. That an old lady could live for seventy years in a damp cave, in a chilly climate, and escape such inconveniences is a sign of her time and of ours.
It is not known at what age Eve died, but if she reached the term of three score years and ten these perfect and undisturbed bones may be imagined to be those of the Mother of Men. Eve is generally depicted by the sculptor as an elegant lady with a noble Greek face, in which is realised the extreme of refinement. It would probably be more exact if our first mother were shown in the form of a stalwart woman with the countenance of the Australian aborigines or of a Hottentot.
A SIDE STREET IN MENTONE.
The lady of Mentone has around her forearm two bracelets. They are made of sea shells and are just such as an ingenious child might make while sitting on the beach in an idle summer. One might suppose that the wearer was proud of them, and it may be that vanity in woman and love of dress—or, at least, of jewellery—are born with her. If this be so, it is a pity that the wearer of the bracelets could not have known, in her lifetime, that her cherished ornaments would still be on her arm and would still be gazed upon by men 50,000 years after she had ceased to be.
It is a matter of interest and indeed of present envy to note how perfect are the teeth of these early folk, how strong they are, how solidly they are ground down. They must have gnawed the bones of the mammoth, of the cave bear, and of the woolly rhinoceros, for the remains of such animals are abundant in the dust heaps of these caverns. The standard of comfort in the commune of Red Cliff was low, for it has to be recognised that not only did whole families occupy one apartment, but in that apartment they cooked their food, deposited their refuse, and buried their dead.
In looking at these very venerable ancestors it is the face that naturally attracts the greater attention. There is some expression in a skull, an expression of melancholy and surprise, with a suggestion of ferocity. Conspicuous, especially, is the look of wonder, the open mouth, the staring teeth, the solemn, hollow eye sockets. What images must have been formed within those sunken orbits! Upon what a world must the vanished eyes once have gazed, upon what strange beasts, upon what fantastic glades and woods!
When the Red Cliff was inhabited the sea was probably at some distance. From the entry to the cave one would have looked, at one age, over a luxurious subtropical country, glaring with heat, and at another era over a land chilled with ice and deep in snow. During the lifetime of the old lady of the bracelets the climate is assumed to have been cold and damp, the climate, indeed, of England at its worst. There must be, therefore, a bond of sympathy between the aged dame and the present day migrant, who has fled to the Riviera to escape a British winter.
The dwelling places of these very early Riviera visitors are still practically unchanged. We enter by the same portal as they did; we tread the floor they trod, and, looking up, we see the very roof of rock that sheltered them and that they knew so well.
The great cave—the Barma-Grande—has a fine entry, sixty-five feet in height and some thirteen feet in breadth. The cave is still deep, although its length has been curtailed by the callous quarryman, who has cut away much of the outer face of the cliff to find stone for villas, railway bridges, and motor garages. The cave narrows down to a smooth-sided cleft a few feet wide. This must have been a favourite spot, a cosy corner, an easy lounge after a day’s hunting.
The sun passes over the cavern wall as over the face of a dial, moving inch by inch just as it has moved, day by day, for unknown thousands of years. The creeping light serves to record on the rock the passing of time. The cave-wife, busy with flint scraper and unwieldy lumps of mammoth flesh, would note, perhaps with concern, that the sun had already reached a certain grey boss on the wall which told that the height of the day was near and yet that the daily meal was not ready. The sun still falls on the same spot on the wall at the same moment of time, for neither the sun nor the cave has changed.
A SIDE STREET IN MENTONE.
MENTONE: RUE MATTONI.
Just in front of the caves of the Baoussé-Roussé, between their entries and the sea, runs the old Roman road. Compared with the colony of Red Cliff it is a modern affair, for it is only a little more than two thousand years old. It ran from the Forum of Rome to Arles, a distance, it is said, of 797 miles. It carried the Roman legions into Gaul. It carried the merchant adventurers from the East, together with as miscellaneous a crowd of wanderers as any road in Europe bears witness of. Many a Roman centurion must have rested in these caves, many an Oriental pedlar laden with strange wares, many a man of arms seeking his fortune in the West, with perhaps a troubadour or two, a jester bound to other Courts, or the aimless man who followed the Wandering Jew. Pirates have used these caves for their tragic affairs, as well as wreckers and honest fishermen. In more recent times smugglers found hereabout convenient depots from which to run their goods across the border; while frontier guards have been posted in these shadows with flintlocks to watch for the unwary buccaneer. Still nearer to the present day one can imagine that the dolorous lover has carved his lady’s name upon the wall of the cave by means of a flint implement which his uneasy foot had unearthed from among the ancient dust of the deserted dwelling-place. Could the life and times of the occupants of the Red Cliff be written, from the days of the first inhabitant to the period of to-day, a history of Europe would be provided which could never be excelled for picturesqueness nor for vivid detail.
The environment of the old colony is at the moment singularly incongruous. The entrance to the principal cave is walled up and admission thereto can only be obtained by the payment of 2f. per person. A small museum, full of precious bones, stands on the Roman road; a railway tunnel penetrates the very heart of the cliff, so that the rumble of express trains disturbs the peace of the dead who still lie on the very spot where their bodies were laid long centuries ago. There is a fashionable hotel on the summit of the cliff, and at its foot a popular restaurant. From the depths of the cave the sound of music can be heard when the restaurant is very exuberant and is offering especial cheer.
If the old lady with the bracelets were now to stand at the door of her cave on a starry night she could see, beyond Mentone, a strange glow in the sky, the glow from the thousand lights of the gaming-rooms of Monte Carlo.
CASTILLON (IN THE SNOW).
CASTILLON: THE ENTRY TO THE TOWN.