Alongside his novels, Michel Jullien has written a reflection on cave art in the form of an essay, an escape, a reverie. He invites his reader to the threshold of Combarelles, in the Périgord Noir region, near the Vézère river, a long passageway dotted with hundreds of engravings. As an erudite walker, he invites himself into some twenty other caves, summoning up a host of literary figures, but more than that, weaving his text around a highly unusual body of iconography. The Magdalenian bestiary rubs shoulders with images such as those sent into space by NASA in the 1970s, Hiroshima after the atomic bombing, Hugo's drawings, the bodies of Pompeii, Fox Talbot's photographs, Géricault's horses... a wealth of visual imagery interwoven with his subject matter, disconcerting the reader in the same way that cave visitors are captivated by cave paintings.