A summer evening in a swampy clearing, in the middle of a lush, dark forest. The exquisite musical humming of dragonflies. This is Arold’s most deeply engraved memory of his awakening to the world, somewhere in Dordogne, in the southwest of France. He grew up alone in this harsh, hilly, ancestral landscape, steeped in mystery. During his wanderings, his spirit at once alert and meditative, Arold collected flint stones, which abound in the region. One day, he discovers a rocky crevice, hidden behind a tangle of vegetation. He decides to explore it. He crawls along a tunnel just big enough to give him passage for over a kilometer before emerging into a large space. He lights up the cavern by rhythmically striking two flint stones together. The flying sparks light up the walls, revealing images from the depths of time. The rhythmical sound of the flints as they are struck, and the stroboscopic light that they produce, make the colorful wall paintings spring to life and dance as Arold watches. The pulsing beats, echoed back by the luminescent rocky walls, wrap him in a swell of bewitching sound. The images multiply and whirl around Arold, magnifying, sharpening, heightening his senses. Intense smells, bestial and atavistic, sweep into the reptilian depths of his brain. Suddenly, Arold is catapulted into a deep trance, an upswell of sweetly timeless and infinitely soothing hyper-consciousness, a state of total fusion with the space-time continuum. When Arold emerges from the cavern, he discovers that his two flints are now pointed, sharp as boar teeth. He looks around, smiles. The world is his oyster. From now on, he will call himself Arold Flinter.

Followers of Fouls