Word: caving
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...says in director Lian Lunson's feature-length tribute in words and music. "I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations." The congratulations come from others: Bono, who proclaims, "This is our Shelley; this is our Byron"; and a passel of singers (Kate McGarrigle, Rufus Wainwright, Antony, Nick Cave) performing his pieces in concert...
...Vitalub, a common ammonium disinfectant. But the fusarium appeared unscathed: scientists later learned that it lived in diabolical symbiosis with a bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, which was degrading the fungicide. So the restorers added antibiotics to the mix in which they soaked bandages to plaster the lower walls of the cave. Tons of quicklime, which kills fungus but also temporarily raised the cave's ambient temperature, was spread on the floor. Since the worst of the infection has been brought under control, the team now relies on "mechanical removal"--that is, carefully plucking the filaments from the wall by hand...
Lascaux might have escaped history and its indignities if four boys rambling on a hillside just east of the Vezere River in southwestern France in 1940 had not decided to investigate an opening revealed by a fallen tree. Soon Abbe Henri Breuil, a pioneer in the study of Paleolithic cave art, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorized that Lascaux's broad galleries might indicate a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory," and people clamored to see it. After the war, the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property...
...beginning of the 1970s, Lascaux had found a kind of stability. The crowds were gone, the lichens banished, and Jacques Marsal, one of the cave's boy discoverers, was in the cave almost every day, alert to even the slightest changes. Studies had determined that the cave could handle about five visitors a day for 35 minutes each, five days a week; that protocol was never exceeded for the next 30 years. Since 1983, the crowds that come to the region have had to settle for Lascaux II, a modern facsimile that gives them an inkling of the cave paintings...
...contends that the fungus has not caused irreversible damage to the paintings, but others disagree. Laurence Leaute-Beasley, a Franco-American who led art tours into Lascaux from 1982 to 2001 and formed the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux in 2004, says one knowledgeable visitor to the cave in April not only saw fusarium on the paintings but also noticed a grayish tinge to formerly black surfaces where growths had been removed. When the quicklime was removed from the cave over the course of last year, so too was what was left of the soil--which could affect...