Читать книгу The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story - Pamela Petro - Страница 9

Go inside a stone

That would be my way …

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed,

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill –

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the star-charts

On the inner walls.

‘Stone’, Charles Simic

I was lost and trapped behind a truck. Not just any truck, an Auto École truck – a big, lumbering learner’s vehicle that inched along and came to a painstakingly diligent stop at each intersection. Instead of overtaking it and risking a fiery death, I decided to hang back and try to get a bearing on where I might be.

It was late afternoon and the sun flared in my windscreen. This seemed impossible: according to my map I’d been heading east. But prolonged squinting proved I was driving west, and the map was old. So I pulled over, irked at lost time but thankful to be rid of the truck, swung the car around, and headed the other way, in the direction of the Rouergue – one of the few places in France, wrote Fernand Braudel, not yet entirely transformed by the modern world.

Quickly the ravishing but mild, carefully tended farmland of northeast Quercy, where the region meets the Dordogne, became a pleasant memory. As I drove east the vegetable colours faded and the soil grew pinker. Towns and farms became scarce and the wavy earth fell almost flat, like a sea with long, rolling swells from a distant storm. Only here the swells were covered in pale moors or forests of stumpy scrub-oak: low trees with thick, gnarly branches whiskered in lichen that made them an alternately venerable or menacing presence, depending on whether they were in sun or shadow.

I did not know it at the time, but later discovered that I was crossing the Causse de Gramat, one of Quercy’s ‘Petits Causses’, so named to differentiate them from the Grands Causses farther to the east. Despite the aged look of the trees they gradually came to seem newborn, a kind of piny stubble, once it became clear that the land was assaulting me with a dose of deep, geological time. Exposed bedrock was everywhere; the causse crawled with it, and the roadside shoulders were bleached white with its dust. Outcrops shared the moors with occasional sheep and goats. Dry-stone walls, thickly overgrown with moss and lichen, wine-tipped with tiny flowers, textured either side of the smooth macadam like mountains on a topographical map. The road itself was relatively new and its construction had left gashes in the earth that hadn’t yet scarred over in the weathered grey of the walls.

Out of these roadcuts tumbled the colours of crustacea, coral, and seashells: white and light grey, cream, tan, pink, and peach. The whitish stone had been tinted by iron oxide, but the marine allusion was on the mark. These were the same colours I would find in the cool interiors of Romanesque churches. This was the same smell I would smell there: a salt-and-chalk scent I remembered from childhood, from holding conch shells to my nose and taking a great sniff. It was the smell, I’d learn, of Conques Abbey. In that sanctuary and others I’d remember the Causse de Gramat and feel the tug of an ancestral memory-tide ebbing back to ancient seas. For that rock and this – everything within eyeshot, all of the stone tumbling from the roadcuts – was limestone.

Limestone is essentially calcium carbonate – it’s called calcaire in French – brought into being by the joint agencies of weight, time, and the sea. As sedimentary rock, limestone is made up from layer upon layer of compressed sea-bottom graveyards, rich with lime secreted from the dead things that collect there: algae, coral, the shells of marine invertebrates, the drowned. As building stone it’s wonderfully abundant, and for humid regions like Europe there has never been a material more receptive to man’s need for shelter, or his drive to express his imagination. The earth gives it up with relative ease and, unlike marble, limestone blocks hold firm against one another – marble skids – which is why Romanesque arches and Gothic vaults literally got off the ground. Most limestone is also mercifully soft and easy to carve (only soapstone and alabaster are easier, but they’re too delicate to be practical building materials). Although its rogue fossils occasionally deflect a chisel, it takes and keeps any detail a stonecarver’s imagination wishes upon it.

Like all sedimentary rock, limestone is a process as much as a substance. At the earliest stage it’s just latent ooze, still in the midst of precipitating out of seawater and collecting in beds on the ocean floor. There is limestone-to-be forming right this minute. The hard, chalky rock of the Causse de Gramat was at this stage during the Jurassic Period, the middle phase of the Mesozoic Era, which lasted from between 208 to 145 million years ago. At that time the causses formed the seabeds of shallow, prehistoric oceans: it was here that M. Vaylet’s plesiosaurus would have swum.

The Mesozoic was a 185-million-year bull market for the species then occupying the globe, especially the reptiles, whose evolutionary stock proliferated as their bodies swelled to stupendous size. The dinosaurs developed during the Jurassic, which was named for tremendous outcrops of limestone in the Jura Mountains, in Switzerland. The Jurassic has been called ‘the noblest of geological time’. Life was good then. The dinosaurs enjoyed the kind of environment we see today only on expensive vacations. Large, warm seas were hiked into shallows by chains of coral reefs. There were underwater gardens of sea lilies and acres of oyster beds. Dunes and shell banks piled the shores. The dinosaurs came of age in this period and then had their time in the sun all throughout the Cretaceous, as geologists call the following 80 million years. It was during this last period that a massive volcano erupted in what is known now as Espalion, about thirty miles to the east, covering its flanks in lava that, as it cooled and hardened, became the basalt mound Lucy Porter noted in her journal.

About 65 million years ago the dinosaurs vanished abruptly and the Mesozoic seas began to dry up, bringing the era to a close. As they evaporated they left behind limestone outcrops, where masons quarried only a thousand years ago for stone with which to build and sculpt Romanesque churches. Not quite a hundred years ago the Porters drove across these limestone plateaux in their 1920 Fiat, in search of the masons’ handiwork; today I was doing the same in my rented Renault. Had any of us been a few million years earlier, we would have needed a boat.

As I approached the crossroads village of Livernon – that is all it was, literally, a crossroads – I came upon a pile of bones left over from this fathomless, geological past: an acre, maybe, of loose, palm-sized rocks, pure white, for all the world like an archetypal joke, a caveman’s trash heap in a cartoon. I slammed on the brakes and got out and took one as a souvenir. It smelled of both seashells and sanctity; it smelled of church. There was latent sculpture underfoot, sanctuaries, farmhouses, walls, and villas. This was where Romanesque sculpture had come from and what had made it possible in the first place – this landscape, this stone, this history that so dwarfed my imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, climbing a mountain in Germany, once defined the sublime by saying that it resided in a suspension of the powers of comparison. On that afternoon the causse achieved sublimity, as geological time struck my associative memory stone cold mute.

So I retracted back into the sphere of my kind, projecting human aspirations on the obliging rock. So much potential all around, and what 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 to shift attention from Rome. Its popularity also drew upon proto-tourist attractions along the route: the new Romanesque churches going up in southern France, with their beautiful, terrifying, bizarre sculpture – some abbeys also had powerful relics of their own – and the battlefield of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, where Charlemagne’s nephew, the folk-hero Roland, had died in battle. By the 1130s the pilgrimage was established enough to have its own ‘guidebook’, which offered opinionated advice on just about everything.

‘The Navarese bark like dogs’, complained the anonymous, Francophile author. Kingsley Porter wrote that from The Pilgrim’s Guide, which is actually a portion of a manuscript called the Callistine Codex, ‘We learn the characteristics of various nations – which peoples were kindly, which treacherous, which dirty; where the wine was good, and where the food was bad; where rivers could be forded; and where inns or hospices afforded shelter for the night.’

For most Western Europeans the pilgrimage took a year to undertake. Set out at the end of winter, travel in spring, arrive in summer, retrace your steps in autumn, return with the first snow. If, of course, you returned at all (if you didn’t show up within one year, the compulsory will made out for you by your parish priest was promptly acted upon). The pilgrimage was attractive to all social classes – rich people eventually paid others to walk for them – but for the most part Compostela pilgrims were poor peasants and serfs, usually elderly and therefore expendable to their lords. These people walked an average of fifteen miles a day, often in hopes of curing pre-existing ailments. They were endemically cheated by toll-takers and moneychangers, beset by bandits, and at the mercy of river ferrymen who sometimes purposely sank boats in order to loot their drowned customers. They suffered from heat stroke on unshaded Spanish roads (French roads were purposely lined with trees on one side, to provide comfort). And they were trapped in late spring blizzards crossing the Pyrenees – an event I knew a thing or two about, having crept in my car from France to Andorra through the Pas de la Casa in April. The two-lane road had writhed in an agony of curves as snow slicked the surface and low clouds clamped visibility down to about ten feet. It was perhaps more treacherous in a car than on foot – accidents littered the shoulders – but unlike foot-travellers, at least I could turn up the heat.

Despite the litany of hazards, pilgrims went to Compostela. They went in droves, ushering in a boom in the medieval shoemaker’s trade, their only protection a deterrent that sprang from the same fountainhead as their own incentive: fear of eternal damnation. It was a grievous sin to harm one of St James’s faithful, who were identified by costume and an insignia – the scallop shell – which has been the symbol of the Compostela pilgrimage since the eleventh century.

The pilgrimage to Santiago, to the home of St James, was above all an expression of optimism. In a world that recognized no causality other than God’s or the Devil’s constant meddling – illness was the work of the latter, good luck of the former – one’s future in both life and death depended on the beneficence of otherworldly forces. St James had the power to intercede on a supplicant’s behalf, especially that of a pilgrim who had given a year of his life and crossed the better part of a continent to honour the saint in his resting place. James was powerful; he had been Christ’s disciple; he was a reminder that all was not lost. Through his bones shone a chink of light within the theological shadow of near-certain damnation. The pilgrimage ultimately attested to the tenacity of human hope.

The path of the GR 65 ruts the emotional landscape of the Rouergue and Quercy. It’s not on my Michelin map, but the chemin falls like a latitude line across people’s lives. It has been a constant for over a thousand years, and thus a directional anchor. ‘Oh, you’re looking for the dolmen? Go to the pilgrimage road, and turn left.’ Or, ‘You can buy tweezers in the Pharmacie de l’Europe. It’s the one near the bridge, on the Road.’

The Chemin de St Jacques is also an attitude line; it is impossible not to perceive its presence – the westbound direction laden with spiritual urgency, the eastbound with equal measures of relief and disappointment – as a yardstick for one’s own journeys. Everyone who travels in the territory must at some point wonder how a pilgrimage differs from a mere journey. Must one be travelling on the soul’s business, to address God, or can a pilgrimage be more prosaic? Does spiritual business necessarily involve God?

I was rather unproductively pondering these questions as I approached the village of Conques, in the Rouergue; specifically, I had been mulling over the idea of an incomplete pilgrimage, which is how I fancied my travels. I was setting out to visit Romanesque sites on a branch of the pilgrimage road in southwest France, but defying the historical and spiritual tug of its destination, in Spain. Few roads lead nowhere, and this one had one of the most famous endpoints in European history. Even the stars of the Rouergat sky formed directional arrows, reproaching me for my stillness (it is said that the Milky Way leads to Compostela, the ‘Starry Field’ in the west). What did it mean to be more concerned with a segment of the chemin than its conclusion? A wilful choice of body over soul?

I put my hand to the south door of the abbey and it drew me in more than opened to applied pressure. I lost my balance and stumbled inside, into the bear hug of a large priest who was on his way out into the night. His white cassock glowed against the black space beyond. We both spoke in wine-scented whispers. Yes, I was welcome to come in, the abbey was open. But attention! The paving stones were uneven.

I stepped inside: the great building was dissolving into echoes of darkness. At first greys, masonry greys, hovered at eye level. As they rose upwards they grew less substantial, optical memories more than illuminated stones, until the visual echoes faded entirely and the majestic barrel vault of Conques Abbey ceased to be, and for me, not knowing if the stars were out yet or not, became heaven itself. Soon the foundations of the massive pillars and the exterior walls disappeared too. I was inside an idea of a Romanesque church, nothing more concrete than that, but that idea was strong, and it was enough. I felt the muscle of architecture flex around me, repeating in pleats of rounded arches down the side aisles – and there was a quiet undertone of pleading in that repetition, too – the twelfth-century message of God’s tough love.

I sat down on one of the curiously tiny, rush-back chairs that filled the nave. The night-time had brought singularity back to the abbey. I could smell the church far better than I could see it – it smelled like the rock in my pocket, only damper – and that limy scent defined its space as unique, something different from the green smell of spring drifting on the night-mists outside. By contrast, daylight had revealed not only Conques Abbey itself, but its endless repetition throughout the village. Despite being a ‘Grand Site de France’ – advertised as such by banners on nearby auto-routes – Conques village has remained wondrously small and self-contained, coiled into deep, wooded countryside halfway down the steep declivity that separates the Causse de Comtal from the Dourdou Valley. There is not a modern bone in the village’s medieval body, and yet one of the first things that struck me upon leaving my car and walking into town was wave upon wave of photographic reproduction. I’ve rarely seen such a plural place.

So many images of a single spot! Granted the almost shocking magnetism of the abbey – imagine Big Ben, or the Empire State Building, surrounded by a rural hamlet – and yet still the proliferation of postcards overwhelms. There are old ones, new ones, black-and-white and in colour; postcards in matte finish, shiny finish, printed on textured paper. Postcards of parts of the abbey that are off-limits to visitors, like the one I’d bought of a mermaid clasping her forked tail in each hand, carved onto a capital in the upper gallery. To purchase for 35 centimes an image never intended to be seen from the ground seemed, somehow, a violation of the abbey’s privacy. But then photography heedlessly violates the privacy of time past as well as space delimited, for I had approached the great western façade of Conques, surrounded by its little apron of a cobbled place, with a fixed, black-and-white moment from the morning of 18 August 1920 clasped in my hand.

Unlike Lucy’s, my moment – afternoon, 20 April 2002 – came with distracting colour and sound. An announcer commented on a women’s gymnastics championship on a television set in the Salon de Thé opposite the abbey. ‘I am just ringing to say I am standing in front of the church,’ repeated a blond woman, loudly and carefully, into her mobile. Beside her an Irish setter was hopelessly knotted up in her leash in a patch of shade. Above us all rose the massive, no-nonsense towers of the abbey, braided ‘round above and below by the shimmering roofs of the village’ (Conques is so steep that windows of two-storey houses one block from the church overlook its nave). Hannah Green, in her memoir Little Saint, likened the roofs to dragonfly wings. The standard comparison is fish scales. The traditional Rouergat lauzes, thin, round roof-tiles, here cut from silvery schist and overlapped very much like gills – reminded me of braided leather, arresting my eye again and again with intricate fugues of texture.

I thought of Lucy and Kingsley in Vézelay in 1919, the summer before they had visited Conques. They had fallen in love with the village that clustered around the great Burgundian abbey just as I was becoming smitten with Conques. Lucy had written in her journal that their travelling companion, Bernard Berenson, had fallen asleep in the car on the way back to Paris, and she and Kingsley had been free to fantasize. They’d decided that if their taxes kept going up at home they would return to Vézelay to live in one of the little houses that framed the abbey, and have a garden in front and a view at the back.

I smiled at the familiar daydream, and began to commence on one of my own. But there was the setter to untangle, and a photo to be taken of three Brazilians from Belo Horizonte. After that, my moment in Conques merged with Lucy’s, and I forgot everything but the great, scarcely weathered tympanum before me, to which traces of coloured paint still cling. A Conquois friend of Hannah Green’s called the tympanum ‘one of the four wonders of the world’ (she neglected to name the other three). Just a glance reveals its importance. The early twelfth-century abbey is predominantly built of buttery yellow limestone (salted butter, to be exact; the interior is the paler shade of whipped sweet butter), with rosy mortar and mottled grey schist in-fill. The tympanum, however, and the pierres de tailles – the fitted stones – of the surrounding portal are pure, creamy, ochre-coloured sandstone. The very best stuff the quarry had to offer.

The eye notes this and marks it; only when you move in closer do you realize that the golden stones were set there as a lure, to lead you to one of the most magnificent spectacles of Romanesque art. And it is a spectacle, like a parade or a circus, with a multitude of incidents, intimate and grand, frightening and beatific, some grimly funny, mushrooming throughout every inch of the sculpted half-moon. The theme is the Last Judgement. At the church of Perse in Espalion the great reckoning was compactly and clumsily depicted in shorthand – just a reference to ignite whatever associations already existed in the viewer’s mind. Here the theme has become art, supplying visual images of its own, supplanting others. Imagine that a director of greatness, of real vision and inspiration, working with a troupe of earnest amateurs, has set out to perform skits from the Second Coming of Christ – not to convey the idea of judgement, but to narrate it. The result is the tympanum of Conques.

Back at university my professor had thought that the little sculpted actors, the saints and the saved, the devils and damned, had a ‘folk-art quality’; my guidebook found them ‘endearingly anecdotal’. What I think they both meant is that the carvings are not types, representing ideas, but individuals acting out very particular rewards and punishments. This is an impolitic thing to say, but then travel books permit the occasional lapse into sentimentality: they are heart-achingly sweet. Even the devils look like nice guys in masks, trying to be mean. An abbot takes the hand of Charlemagne, depicted as an old, stooped, shuffling king, and kindly leads him into heaven. And it was a compassionate heart that imagined the justice of the damned – nowhere else but the tympanum of Conques would a rabbit be given the opportunity to roast the man who had hunted him, on a spit, eternally, in Hell.

Ste Foy, to whom Conques Abbey is dedicated, kneels under a miniature eave on the left-hand side of the composition, blessed quite literally by the hand of God. Foy, the ‘little saint’ of Hannah Green’s book, was beaten, broiled, and decapitated at the age of twelve, in the year 303, for refusing to pay lip service to the Roman pantheon. She was canonized a century later. Her remains lay at Agen, near Toulouse, for over four hundred years, until she was either stolen, lent, or borrowed (the facts are unclear) and brought to Conques, where a piece of her skull was set into a portable reliquary statue around the year 900. Foy had already been working miracles, but she seemed to like the reliquary, with its golden face – probably originally that of a Celtic god – and feverishly granted prayers as fast as they came in, rendering the abbey not only a stop on the Via Podiensis, but a pilgrimage destination in itself.

Of all the incidents on the busy tympanum, Lucy typically found and focused on the moment of greatest tension. It is a tension her black-and-white photograph enhances, making the weary graininess of the thousand-year-old carvings into a kind of elemental cognate to the fraught scene (more appropriate to its mood than the cosy sunlight that pampered the stone when I saw it). On the lowest tier of the tympanum, right in the centre, just beneath an angel and devil tensely weighing souls, is a divide; on one side angels lead little souls into what looks like a coat closet, but is actually the door of heaven. On the other, devils cast the damned into the mouth of hell – here depicted as a kind of toothy fish – which emerges from another, grimmer, door. The angel and devil closest to the centre glare at each other across the gulf that separates good and evil. The devil, with sumo-wrestler proportions, punk-spiked hair, and an enormous bludgeon, is the only character on the tympanum blatantly to overwhelm his allotted niche. The others, encased in their cartoon-strip boxes, tell their stories; this devil, however, poses an active threat, as if at any moment he may free himself from the stone and add your story to his.

The angel at whom he stares grabs a little soul by the hand and pulls him out of no-man’s-land – the grey area between good and evil, from which we only see him partially emerging – it’s that close a save – before the devil can get his claws on him. The angel’s eyes hold a dare: just try it, he says to the bludgeon-wielding devil. And yet he hurries the little soul onward toward heaven, just to be safe.

This is it, Romanesque art at its most anxiously appealing. This moment is acted on what Hannah Green calls ‘the rim of time’. The everlasting is about to begin; mortality is about to end. Yet it is a quintessentially human moment, full of fear of the awful arbitrariness of fate. Far from ceasing to be, time plays a role – the angel snatched that soul from the void just in the nick of it – and so does luck.

Most art makes a statement. Romanesque sculpture poses a question: will we be saved? The only answer it musters is a shrug. Maybe. Probably not. There is uncertainty and death, hard work and hunger in this life, and judgement in the next. No wonder its quiet, secular moments, the corbels of clasping couples, fiddlers, dancers, and domestic beasts, all found their places on religious buildings. Each is a touching bid to secure a chip of immortality – the cheap kind found in stone – for the otherwise brief pleasures of life. Despite its fixation with the everlasting, the Romanesque point of view ultimately hails from the conundrum of the human condition. This is one of the reasons I love it so much: it dares to reveal not the nobility, but the vulnerability of life in the face of death.

Lights came on without warning, like a shock of lightning. I had slipped into an over-fed daze sitting in the stony darkness of the nave. Before entering the abbey I’d found a very pink garret room in the Auberge St Jacques, just steps away, and had eaten dinner there too in the over-lit dining room. The young waiter had inquired if I wanted a salade aux gésiers. I’d asked what it was.

‘Une salade avec pommes et poulet, Madame,’ is what I heard.

A salad avec pommes de poulets is what came. Not a salad with apples and chicken at all, but a salad with apples of the chicken – fried gizzards, in other words. Ah, I’d thought, undone by a crafty French preposition. Not the first time, nor the last. What I’d actually ordered was a Salade Caussenarde, a speciality of the region, made up of mixed greens, local walnuts, and either crumbled feta or Roquefort cheese. Mine came with Roquefort – an appropriate choice, considering the caves where the cheese is aged used to belong to the monks of Conques. I willed myself to forget what I was eating. After the duck, crusty crème brulée, and half-bottle of Gaillac that followed, and then the soft abbey darkness, I had almost fallen asleep. But the abrupt lights in the upper gallery banished any easygoing rapprochement between wakefulness and sleep, night and day, light and dark. My grey-black heaven was gone, replaced by definitive black shadows cutting at odd angles across brilliantly revivified white stone: a sight unbeheld for more than nine hundred of Conques’ thousand years, until the twentieth century wired the abbey for electricity.

An organist had come to practise for tomorrow’s mass. Far above me he struck the keys and vibrations filled every cavity, the barrel vault and my chest alike, making heavy, solemn music inside my body and out. I was thankful the nave itself was still fairly dark, and the side aisles, too. They beckoned me away from the electric intrusion like conduits to an alternate state of mind, much as the road outside my window had at night, when I was a child. A nearby streetlight had thrown leaf patterns into a small puddle of illumination, casting the road beyond into even greater darkness. I knew where it led – down to Grove Avenue, my school, the football field – but I would pretend it could take me anywhere.

Surely the drive to go, to be surprised, to leave the unrelenting known for whatever lay beyond, has always lurked somewhere beneath the pilgrim’s piety. In his book on pilgrimage, Peter Sumption suggests that upon taking to the road the pilgrim left behind the chief quality of medieval life – ‘monotonous regularity and the rule of overpowering conventions’. He cites a fifteenth-century writer who bluntly identified the wanderlust factor: a pilgrim’s principal motivation, he wrote, was ‘curiosity to see new places and experience new things, an impatience of the servant with his master, of children with their parents, or wives with their husbands’.

Not surprisingly, Kingsley put his finger on the same chord. ‘Into the psychology of the pilgrimage there must have entered love of wandering for its own sweet sake,’ he wrote in Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. ‘The same restlessness that creates the modern tourist spurred on the men of the Middle Ages to roam.’

‘For its own sweet sake’. Again and again, Lucy notes in her journal their arrival at a hotel and her keen desire to bathe and nap, while Kingsley goes ‘out to investigate the village’, or ‘takes a walk’, or ‘visits the church’. The man was perpetually restless. During the early stages of their courtship it nearly killed him to spend the summer of 1911 at home reading Rabelais (counting the pages was ‘an indication, doubtless, that I am not properly enjoying it’), while Lucy travelled on the West Coast. He made a show of being enthusiastic about her adventures, but envy got the better of him. ‘One day I was dragged out yachting, which fairly made my hair curl with excitement.’ In another letter he was ‘stale from lack of travel’. When Lucy wrote of her climb up Mount Hood, in Oregon, he replied: ‘I thoroughly envy you the experience. I hate hard climbs while I am doing them – always get as scared as a kitten and never fail to vow to myself that if I get down safely I shall never no never try a mountain again – and yet one always does.’ By the time he finished writing, his blood was ‘on fire’ to climb anything.

Janice Mann, who wrote comparatively of Kingsley and Émile Mâle, believed Kingsley’s wanderlust to be typical of his nationality and generation. ‘For Porter,’ she wrote, ‘the process of art history was one of travel – physical and figurative – to the frontier. His sense of art historical accomplishment was satisfied by moving from familiar areas of the discipline into the unknown, just as progress in the European settlement of America involved moving repeatedly from civilisation into the wilderness. He was drawn to the open road both literally and metaphorically.’

It was true: as more scholars moved into the study of Romanesque art in the late 1920s, Kingsley shifted his focus to Ireland, where he and Lucy acquired a castle in Donegal as a base for his pioneering work on early Christian crosses. But even more intriguing than his need to roam was the nature of the unknown that Kingsley sought. For him, as well as for other American writers from Henry Adams to Henry James, the ‘wilderness’ of which Mann speaks was nothing other than the European past: a wilderness in time rather than place. In Kingsley’s case, he was not travelling to discover a new, empirical reality – a continent that could be sampled, measured, drawn, and detailed – but rather overlooked evidence that would substantiate a dream of the Middle Ages that he already held in his head. Like Conques Abbey in darkness, invisible but present, Kingsley imagined a world that could be sensed but no longer be seen, built upon remnants and old stone foundations that he and Lucy sought by day, of a society he valued far more than his own. Like me, he was a romantic, rebuilding the ruined eternity of the Romanesque in his mind, spellbound by his own reinventions.

His friends, notably the Irish poet George Russell, known by his epithet ‘Æ’, teased him about his disregard for modern life. Imagining Kingsley’s horror of air travel, Russell wrote with delight, ‘I suppose that would be an adhesion to the mechanical age which would seem to you almost as bad as Bolshevism. I fancy you sigh for travels with a donkey like Stevenson’s.’ He goes on to muse upon Lucy’s feelings for donkeys, then adds in clear-headed fashion, ‘I am sure with all your yearning for a simpler age without mechanics you could not endure it. You really ought to thank Heaven that you being born in a comfortable age can investigate uncomfortable ages without their dirt, smells, bad cooking, lack of sanitation, etc.’

Russell hit a nerve; Mann, too, feels that Kingsley regarded the medieval world as an insular, golden time in painful contrast to the whirring gears of an increasingly mass produced, mechanized America. It was this yearning of his, more than anything else, that provided a private, portable milieu within which he carried on his work as a scholar, and which suggests that the Porters’ travels amounted to a kind of pilgrimage in their own right – a pilgrimage back in time to satisfy a need of the imagination. An archaeologist’s search for relics upon which to build an imagined, better place is perhaps not so very different from a medieval pilgrim’s prayer to Ste Foy, or St James, to one day be admitted to the collective dream of heaven. That Kingsley linked his own road with the great pilgrimage route to Compostela is apparent, more than anywhere else, in the rapture of his prose. Of the Chemin de St Jacques he wrote:

One feels, as nowhere else, wrapped about by the beauty of the Middle Age. One is, as perhaps never before, emotionally and intellectually stimulated. Shards of the memory, long unused, are set vibrating. The actuality of the pilgrimage, like a cosmic phenomenon, overwhelms with the sense of its force, its inevitability. It seduces one, irresistibly …

Neither Lucy nor Kingsley was particularly religious; the endemic Protestantism of their youths seems to have manifested itself as a horror of idleness rather than a spirituality-driven habit of traditional churchgoing. Ironically, for a Luddite like Kingsley, it was their very American reliance on mechanical innovation – not just the Fiat, but the camera, especially – that most set their own journey apart from the spirit of the medieval pilgrimage in which he had so longed to invest himself.

The linchpin of pilgrimage, or relic-worship in general, is that the sacred item, be it a saint’s finger, whole carcass, or lock of holy hair, not only heals and answers prayers; it also confers sacredness on its environment. As William Melczer writes in his introduction to The Pilgrim’s Guide, ‘Pilgrim and relic are two sides of the same coin. The one is conditioned by the other. The essential mobility of the pilgrimage is a function of the essential immobility of the relic.’ Compostela, Conques, and all the other destinations of sacred medieval travel were mountains that would never, ever go to Muhammad.

Yet Lucy’s three-legged view camera broke the bond between place and pilgrimage. Her photographs rendered the hallowed stone fortresses to which penitents had trudged in a westward direction for almost a millennium as light and slim and portable as the paper on which their images were printed. Relics – or rather their encircling architecture – were no longer essentially immobile. Photographs took a print of their souls and rendered them relational commodities, open to comparison and historical analysis, able to be scrambled and studied; they were no longer absolutes wedded to a particular plot of earth by the sacred weight of a pile of stones. The ebbing of faith, of course, is responsible for the erosion of belief in traditional pilgrimage, but photography released the process of it, the procession of it, from the steady, seasonal gravitation of its course even for non-believers. Lucy and Kingsley did the Chemin de St Jacques backwards, in a car.

The abbey’s everlasting dampness had been inching through layers of skin, muscle, fat, and blood vessels until it finally reached the marrow of my bones, chilling me to my soul. I got up to leave and go to bed – the organ was still sending crashing breakers of Bach through my chest – and when I did, I noticed something unusual. The abbey’s white windows had taken on colour. Conques’ windows probably peeve traditionalists, but to me they are sublimely simple, pure and organic, a modern response to the craving for ‘stained’ glass. They were designed by the artist Pierre Soulages and installed in 1993: opaque white panes broken by black trim. By day they define whiteness, rendering the pale limestone interior creamy-grey by comparison. By night they pick up, alternately, the blues and amethysts of twilight and the pinks and oranges of the sodium vapour lamps outside, staining the glass with the modern colours of night.

I was seeing these shades for the first time, and I smiled to myself to think how similar they were to those of the limestone rocks spilling from roadcuts on the Causse de Gramat. Outside in the dark place, I put my nose to the window of a rock shop just opposite the abbey. Samples of barite, pyrite, agate, and ammonite fossils, all from the Rouergue, gleamed in the dim light. I bent down to look at a piece of limestone carved in the shape of an animal – I couldn’t see what kind – but the moonlight made the window a mirror, and instead all I saw was my own reflection. As I stood up a realization shot across the sleepy night sky of my mind. It wasn’t quite the experience Kingsley had in front of the Coutances cathedral, but it startled me into wakefulness.

‘I look up at the giant stones absorbing the summer sunlight into their age-old might and order, and I think of the massive size and grace of this Romanesque church – the stones, the stones; the skill that went into cutting these stones exactly to measure, each one … the work, the labor of transporting them such a distance across difficult terrain, the skill of the masons … who built with these stones, fitting them precisely, the strength required, the patience.’

Hannah Green’s ode to the abbey’s limestone rang in my ears. My pilgrimage, if it could be called that – and in this instant I thought perhaps it could – needn’t be incomplete. I had been looking at the wrong end of things. My starting point was the Romanesque, and the Porters were showing it to me; but lingering in Quercy and the Rouergue, ignoring Compostela, did not mean I had to be stationary. Kingsley had pursued a pilgrimage that delved into time; why could I not pursue one that delved into place – this place, and the art and architecture to which its environment, its very geology, had given rise? I would follow the sculpture I loved back to the quarries that had given it up a thousand years ago. Let others pursue questions of judgement and salvation; I would go backwards instead of forwards, plumb vertically rather than tread horizontally. It was indeed a body I was seeking: the body of the earth.

My heart pounded out the rightness of the idea. My square pillow, again found hidden in my room’s armoire – log-style French pillows prop my head up too high – would have to wait. Following the newly risen moon I followed some stairs near the south transept down into what remained of the abbey’s medieval refectory. A fountain splashed in the middle and columns salvaged from a former cloister made a dark gallery along one side of the square. In the strong moonlight it wasn’t hard to find the capital I was seeking. In the very best limestone of all, pale grey, denser and harder even than the smooth, tawny sandstone of the tympanum, were carved eight tiny stonemasons, peering out over the wall of the cloister that they were in the process of building. It was as close as I’d ever come to a snapshot from the early twelfth century.

I loved it: self-made memorial and in-joke, all in one compact composition. The masons’ wide faces had deep-bored eyes and serious expressions; one was blowing a horn, the others gripped a variety of tools of their trade. In the moonlight, glimmering with a hint of sodium-vapour orange, they looked to have been carved from opal. I told them about my pilgrimage and promised I would be back.

‘Quarries?’ wrote my friend Annie. ‘You are the oddest person. It’s that stone thing again, isn’t it?’

Annie Garthwaite, originally of Hartlepool, lately of Shropshire, met in Wales, had agreed to fly into Toulouse to join me for a long weekend’s hike. I sprang the quarry idea on her at the last minute; she had thought we were doing the pilgrimage route, but said the itinerary really didn’t matter as long as there was plenty of red wine at the end. I picked her up on a Friday afternoon, and we drove three hours straight to Conques on a highway posted with signs warning of wild boars. I was returning to the little masons, as promised, after a three-month absence. We passed toast-coloured stone barns propped with angled buttresses, textured like errant tweeds, and tiny villages where the roofs winked, turning up ever so slightly at the ends in the French proposition that, even in rural hinterlands, form should follow beauty, then function.

Back at the Auberge St Jacques we climbed four flights of stairs to our room, laden with plastic bags chattering with the weight of wine bottles, bread, cheese, chocolate, and grapes. Annie is a shrewd businesswoman with a hair-trigger appreciation of things ridiculous and absurd, quick wit, and a fanatical devotion to Richard III, whom she believes history has wantonly maligned. She has a practical streak that she takes care to keep well hidden.

‘Pam,’ she asked, pouring herself some wine and raising one eyebrow – a talent of hers – ‘just curious: where are these quarries? Do you have a map?’

I waved a 1:25,000 blue series production of the Institut Géographique National at her. ‘But come with me, I’ll show you our real map.’

I led her to the abbey. The oldest portions in the apse and south transept, including the Chapel of Ste Foy, which date from around 1040, are built of rougier, plum-red sandstone from the Dourdou Valley and the southwestern Rouergue. It’s soft stuff: a millennium of smoke, incense, and a miasma of congregational sweat have eroded even the interior capitals past recognition. Around the turn of the twelfth century limestone was discovered and began to be quarried in the nearby village of Lunel, southwest of Conques on the Causse de Comtal. The ochre-coloured limestone was sturdier, tougher, more reliable than rougier; masons used it for the towers, western façade, north wall, and most of the cloister capitals. Locally it’s called rousset, a word that derives from Occitan and means ‘dark yellow’, although underground, before the stone has been deepened and darkened by sunlight, it is the creamy-pale shade of the abbey’s interior, like the underside of my forearm.

There is plenty of pewtery schist in the abbey, too: local stone, still harvested from the neighbouring town of St Cyprien-sur-Dourdou, abundant but hard to quarry. Its metamorphic crystals give it a dull sheen like the iridescent film on dead fish.

Schist is everywhere in Conques; it fills the non-load-bearing walls of the abbey and makes up the walls, streets, and roofs of the village, knitting the place together top to bottom. Finally there are the special materials: dense, golden sandstone from Nauviale, a village just down the valley from St Cyprien, reserved for the tympanum and surrounding pierres de tailles, and the magnificent, pale grey limestone of the masons’ own cloister capital. Narrative sources claim that the masons’ limestone is from ‘the Causse’, though none takes care to name which causse. A few other capitals, along with the noble old fountain in the centre of the former refectory, are carved from black-green serpentine, brought in from the Massif Central.

‘Here’s your map,’ I said to Annie. Following the sweep of my hand her eyes tripped down the nave. The abbey may have been erected to please heaven, but it still sings of the earth. Stone is stone, raised in architecture or lying quietly underground. More than other structures, the great, glorified cave in front of us – that’s what Romanesque churches really are, barrel-vaulted, above-ground caves -affirmed the bond between nature and the works of man. Deep inside the Last Judgement are memories of the valley, the Dourdou and its fish, vineyards planted by the monks of Conques (vineyards that today yield the Rouergue’s only Appellation d’origine contrôlée wine, the reds and sophisticated roses of Marcillac). The façade and its towers remember ponies, sheep, a big sky; wind hurling across the open pastures of the Causse de Comtal. A thousand years ago masons united the topography of the central Rouergue in a religion of stone.

Trying to find a balance between geology and human history, Vidal de la Blache proposed, ‘One should start from the idea that a country is a storehouse of dormant energies whose seeds have been planted by nature, but whose use depends on man.’ It was those dormant energies that interested me now.

‘We, my friend,’ I said to Annie, in what I hoped was a grand manner, ‘are going to follow the rousset, everything you see around you – the limestone – back to its home on the causse. Tomorrow we’re hiking to Lunel.’

By morning, Annie, who had been studying the blue series map, had formulated a plan of her own. ‘Pam,’ she mused, dragging the ‘a’ in my name until it became two syllables, ‘instead of going back and forth to Lunel on the same route, why don’t we make it a triangle: south to St Cyprien, east to Lunel, northwest back to Conques?’

Her triangle seemed logical enough – I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it. We set off in a shower of church bells, not at the crack of dawn, but at a civilized mid-morning hour after an open-air breakfast attended by flies. I’d vouched for the coffee, but Annie had insisted on having tea.

Our route descended along a narrow, writhing lane from the car park outside the village, where all non-local cars must be stabled, to the main road to St Cyprien alongside the Dourdou. Healthy cornstalks rustled in the wind like conspirators. Annie, the inveterate gardener, identified flora: yellow evening primrose, coral-coloured campsis vines, which grew amidst sandstone outcrops the shade of old wine stains. I pocketed a piece of schist I’d been kicking along. We were too early for dégustation of the local Marcillac in St Cyprien, an incurious little town in the flatbed of the river valley, where residents were going about their morning business along the solitary shopping street. Here we turned east through a two-block suburbia until the houses were overtaken by cornfields.

Above us loomed the causse. ‘Ah, we’ve a climb ahead,’ said Annie lustily, shaking off a passing shower and striding uphill in her hiking boots. I, in my trainers, eyed the rising ground with trepidation. It’s an established fact of our friendship that Annie is hearty; I am less so. The ground rose with a vengeance. About halfway up to the causse, St Cyprien now pocket-sized below us, we came upon a sandstone farmhouse and its outbuildings, all topped with fanciful pavilion roofs covered in schist lauzes. Geraniums and roses outlined the courtyard.

I couldn’t believe the name: La Carrière. ‘It means ‘‘The Quarry’’,’ I translated to Annie, who can’t speak a word of French and doesn’t see this as a defect in the least. Glorious confirmation, it was, to find a thousand-year-old memory ringing in a name. Better yet, just opposite, on the rising hillside, was a geological event that took my breath away.

‘Stand there, stand there!’ I gasped to Annie, pulling out my camera. She finger-combed her blonde hair and smiled. ‘No, no, not you.’ She frowned. ‘Point to the rock and make sure you don’t get in the way.’

Annie pointed and I took a photograph of Ste Foy’s abbey in the rough, before it had become an idea shaped by man. Here on the road to Lunel, like two big animals lying together for warmth, the red sandstone of the lowland met the yellow limestone of the causse. Together their limy run-off turned hydrangea flowers pink rather than blue in the valley below. We could easily see the frontier between the two kinds of bedrock; the line was perpendicular to the ground but tilted precipitously on its axis. It made me shudder. What kind of tectonic chaos, how many millions of years of upheaval, erosion, unimaginable pressure, and more upheaval, had it taken to thrust primeval sea bed and board into this position? Like the masons’ achievement at Conques, this was another union of stone, telling a not-dissimilar story of genesis, death, and rebirth. It was a cycle that had been repeated over and over throughout the 4.55 billion years of pre-history; a cycle still in progress; a cycle given human form and a name in the silent stories of the abbey’s New Testament sculptures.

My compatriot, Henry David Thoreau, said that the Christian notion of looking for God in heaven, literally above our heads, prevents us from understanding that heaven is really here on earth, in the rock beneath our feet. For Thoreau, spirituality lay in the wonders of nature. But I felt its sudden, nascent spark in an interstice, in the tug of kinship between this cliff face and the Abbey of Ste Foy, and that kinship both thrilled and comforted me. Perhaps the two weren’t so different after all.

‘It’s called an angular unconformity,’ I announced.

‘And this,’ said Annie, pointing at a lacy, lavender flower, ‘is called scabious. And that is purple heather. It’s like you – it loves limestone.’

We continued climbing. Handkerchief vineyards clung to the upslope, walnut groves to the down. Without warning Annie became frighteningly high-minded and began quoting from George Herbert’s poem ‘The Pulley’. First she set the stage.

‘God, you see, makes man and then pours out for him a cupful of riches, all but contentment, which he leaves sloshing around in the bottom. Here’s the bit I can remember:

When almost all was out, God made a stay,

Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,

Rest in the bottome lay.

For if I should (said he)

Bestow this jewell also on my creature,

He would adore my gifts in stead of me,

And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:

So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,

But keep them with repining restlessnesse …

She launched that eyebrow at me. I’d thought she hadn’t been paying attention, and now she was reducing the ambiguities of my pilgrimage – and the fount of Kingsley’s wanderlust – to ten lines. Thankfully we’d reached the final, banked curve of the climb and stood at last on the causse. A metallic-tasting wind tossed away our sweat. ‘Where is it?’

I had promised Annie a dolmen. Ahead of us stretched a bumpy blanket of pastures and wheat fields, neatly separated by dark windbreaks. Lunel lay a mile or two down the road. I pointed in that direction.

It was cold now, and we walked with our heads bowed to avoid the wind. Our lunch by the roadside was a brief and chilly affair: an apple and a squashed nectarine, Quaker oatmeal bars I’d brought from home, and two thick slabs of Laguiole cheese from the Aubrac – rough, Rouergat highlands to the east. The cheese tasted like the rind of a fresh Camembert, a young, new taste, but with a supple texture; we ate it atop pilfered slices of baguette from breakfast. Shortly after lunch we came upon the great prehistoric hunks of granite. The dolmen sat next to the macadam encircled by a little gravel drive, giving the impression of a caged beast in a zoo. Annie prowled around it.

‘It’s a wonder to behold.’

‘Don’t make fun of the dolmen.’

‘Perhaps it was made by quite short people.’

At 5 foot 9, she was a good foot taller than the capstone. I had to admit it did look like a very large, mottled mushroom. Hannah Green, however, had been enamoured. She reported its Occitan name, La Peira-Levada, the Raised Stone, and said that a ring of menhirs had once stood nearby. She also wrote that the Celts believed dolmens to be meeting places where the living conferred with the dead, and that they became sites of pilgrimage. The fact that I can’t confirm this is what makes dolmens so wonderful – no one knows much about them, least of all their original or, in the Celts’ case, even secondary significance. Dolmens aren’t ruins; unlike weathered Romanesque carvings, it is their stories, not their shapes, that have eroded away.

And that’s fine. We need to forget in order to invent. Dolmens, too, offer a handshake to the human imagination.

‘Looks like a beached whale,’ remarked Annie. ‘By the by, dare I ask about this quarry of yours?’

I had been anticipating this moment. ‘Well, you see, there is no quarry per se, at least not any more.’ Up went the eyebrow. ‘It was filled in ages ago. But the exact site doesn’t really matter. We’re in Lunel; we know there was a quarry somewhere nearby. This is the place the abbey stone called home. Ancestors of those stone-hatches you just identified for me probably knew it as neighbours.’

Annie snorted good-naturedly as fast clouds patterned the fields with moving shadows. The little village of Lunel was entirely built of rousset – it looked like Conques’ little sister. Kind-eyed cattle the colour of dark caramel, Aubrac cattle, populated the adjacent fields. Here we turned around; the next day we would follow the same route in my car, taking twenty minutes to do what today had taken hours. We retraced our steps for about half a mile before heading off on a new track – the GR 62, a southern tributary of the Chemin de St Jacques – back toward Conques. A wrought-iron cross stood at the turning; pilgrims had come this way. There was also a signpost that put the distance to the abbey at 11 kilometres. I was aghast and immediately began to calculate.

‘Do you realize we’ve already hiked 15 kilometres? Dear God, that will make 26 altogether.’

‘Ooh, that sounds impressive.’

‘Impressive? It’s insane. That’s over 16 miles! No wonder my feet hurt.’ It now dawned on me, belatedly, why I hadn’t come up with Annie’s triangular itinerary on my own. It’s always been dangerous to let her plan hikes and parties: I lacked her fabled stamina in both realms. A farmer working sheep with a rambunctious Border collie – the lambs had tails like pipe cleaners – warned us it was a long way to Conques. ‘Downhill, though,’ he added cheerfully. Blossoms that Annie had just identified as evening-blue cornflowers were startled at our approach and flew off together, revealing themselves (we caught our breath) as butterflies. Wild thyme scented our footfalls.

It was a Rouergat paradise, but even so, once I’d worked out how far we’d walked I began to whine: my arches ached, my hips’ ball-and-socket joints felt like those of an old German Shepherd. Annie, however, marched on relentlessly. For a while the route held to the top of a high ridge, the south face of which fell away dramatically, culminating in the valley below in a perpendicular fan of woolly-wooded, peaked fissures. Patches of oxblood earth showed between gaps in the forest. Finally we began to descend. This is how the stone had come, too, atop wagons hitched to twenty-six pairs of oxen. We were following its tracks. It had been a tradition with medieval pilgrims walking to Compostela to carry stones as a penance (a variation on walking barefoot, or in chains). Sometimes monks put this practice to use, encouraging pilgrims to transport not just any old rocks, but to carry cut stones from quarries to ecclesiastical construction sites. I fingered the piece of schist in my pocket and trudged on.

Some time later Annie broke the silence by asking if I’d rather run a marathon or take heroin.

‘Right now?’

‘Yes, you have to do one or the other right now.’

‘Take heroin.’

‘Thought you’d say that.’

As we neared Conques we came upon a sign pointing toward a detour to a Point de Vue, overlooking the great concha of the Dourdou (Hannah Green translates concha as ‘valley’; others argue that it is the shell-shaped enclave on which Conques is built that lends the village its name). ‘Shall we?’ asked Annie in ready tones.

A look from me sufficed. ‘Ah, well, you get out there and find it’s only an opinion anyway.’

‘How dare you have the strength to be funny,’ I growled. Ancient apple and plum trees, woven with mistletoe, guided us back to the village: we’d been gone for seven hours. That night Annie treated me to a dinner of sea bass with chanterelles – the lacy mushrooms the French call girolles; along with groseilles (red currants), they’re a staple of summer markets – which we downed with a bottle of Gaillac, rounded off with Cognac, at the three-star Hôtel Ste Foy. It had become increasingly difficult for me to speak French in her profoundly English company, and I’m afraid our waiter suffered the consequences. Lucy and Kingsley had lunched in the same place; ‘a heavy meal, of much meat’. Later that night we went to a concert of ‘Chasticovitch’, Mozart, and Schubert, held in the abbey.

The clarity of sound in the big, white, clean space of the church was pure and true. Wayward lines of melody explored the nave, climbed its pillars, ribboned down the arches, while harmony felt its way along the dark side aisles with my eyes, or perhaps ears, in tow. Music and stone were old partners here, still searching together for common ground, joined tonight by the cries of house martins swooping in through the open door and whirling around the nave. Later I asked Annie if she’d picked them out amidst the Schubert.

‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘They balanced it out. A fairly pleasant disharmony, didn’t you think?’