The writer Paul Morand visited Mallorca and was fascinated by the Cuevas del Drac, as is evident in the text of Majorque.
It is the inextricable, a true rope-maker's shop; huge rooms where the stone looks like rope, a colony of enormous corals, a mercer's bric-a-brac, a zoological garden, fringes from a Manilla shawl, weeping willows, chenilles and lace trimmings... Everything there without the interference of men; not Breughel, nor the Piranesi who create The Prisons, nor William Blake, nor Gustave Doré could have imagined such a scene. You suffocate in the belly of this whale which has come to die on the shore between the teeth of this prehistoric monster, amidst these frozen tears hanging above us, like ice on the roof of a Swiss chalet.
Majorque, 1963
Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Toni Nadal.
(París, 1888-1976). Morand was a multifaceted French writer, best known for his travelogues and some novels. He was a diplomat and man of the world, and served in embassies in London, Rome and Madrid, as well as being taken to Latin America and Asia. At the time of the Nazi occupation of France he had no qualms collaborating with the Vichy regime, and that led to enmity with De Gaulle and exile for ten years in Switzerland, where he was the ambassador for Vichy, after the end of the war. His first published works are poems, but he quickly moves to prose with Tendres stocks (1921), which bore a prologue by Marcel Proust. In 1941 he dedicates L’homme pressé to his wife Hélène Soutzo, and in the work we discover the premonition of a modern, restless, unsatisfied traveller... He published dozens of books about his travels and interest in other cultures (Bucarest, 1935; Majorque, 1963). His inclusion in the Académie Française in 1968 was a certain level of recognition and a kind of rehabilitation, thanks to writers such as Jacques Chardonne and the group of young writers known as “les hussards”, who coincided ideologically and also vitally with Morand, all touched with melancholy but also a taste for pleasure.
The sun at Portocristo is like a punch in the face, when you leave the whale full of stalactites and stalagmites, an indescribable tourist attraction, a store of paleontological remains for Dorothy Bate, a concert hall, Blake’s nightmare.
During the 19th century there was a great interest around Europe in exploring caves, linked to the general interest in colonising new lands. The Drac caves, like the rest of Majorca's caves, were no exception. Among the first visitors from outside were the French, and it is not for nothing that one of the four caves at Drac is known as the "cova dels Francesos" (the Frenchmen's cave): Elisée Reclus, the anarchist geographer, called them some of the most beautiful in the world; Édouard-Alfred Martel, considered the founder of speleology, and who has a lake inside the caves named after him, was one of the first to explore them methodically, asked to do so by Archduke Ludwig Salvator; and the traveller, writer and artist Gaston Vuillier, more Catalan than French since he was born in Perpignan, sketched the entrance to the caves and many of the interior spaces, to be published in Les îles oubliées, where he collected information about his journey to Majorca in 1888. In his description of some other caves, at Artà, we find the shocking fact that can also surely be applied to Drac: "They say that recently a considerable number of bones were taken out of the caves at Artà, and they through them in the sea immediately". Inside the Drac caves ceramic remains from all of the cultures that have settled on the island have been found. Paul Morand continued the great tradition of his compatriots that had described the caves passionately.
