ABSTRACT
THE KEEPER OF ANTIQUITIES But the loft of that cathedral-turned-museum was quite the strangest I had ever seen. It was full of skulls. Imagine climbing a dark, narrow spiral staircase as if you were going up into a belfry, then at the top you bent down and almost crawled through a litde aperture and suddenly - diffused yellow light, silence, the occasional slight, brittle noise (perhaps a board creaking, perhaps a bird landing on the roof), a smell of earth and tarry beams. And skulls everywhere: a whole pyramid of skulls like Vereshchagin's painting. They were countless. Long ones, round ones, skulls with fangs and skulls without any teeth at all' horned skulls and hornless skulls, birds' skulls and animals' skulls, skulls on the floor, skulls in plywood boxes, skulls on the beams and skulls right under your feet. And if that were not enough, there were rows of tigers' skulls with cunning, feline eyes, narrow and slightly squinting; in another corner wolves' skulls with their long, mournful, savage, dog-like muzzles. There were more skulls of wolves and wild boar than of any other animal. In a separate heap lay several bears' skulls, with heavy brows and prominent cheekbones. And on a beam facing the entrance, horned as though with two great lances, loomed an aurochs' skulI. Beneath it, in an old cigarbox, I found the fang of a cave bear. For a long time I turned it over and over in my hand. It was a truly lethai weapon - massive, serrated, with a wicked curve to it like a cobbler's knife or a scimitar, designed for ripping through skin, hide and flesh. It breathed the loneliness of the stone age. Not long aga I read some research work done by a German scholar. The cave bear, wrote that German, does not deserve its reputation for ferocity. It was a peaceful, herbivorous beast and he even claimed that it was the fist animal to be domesticated by man ...
