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
