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,
