I was then a boy and the day of my half birthday, the 3^rd of April when my twin and friend Cyril was born, then thirteen and a half, I went inside this dark and millenarian hole. Like thousand other tourists, going for a walk in what is just some karstic cave with hundred of wonderful toffee, milky natural pillars and sheets made of stone, just one of the other steps planned during our trip in Franconian Swtizerland. Many of us had never been in this kind of wet, dark, and fantastic place excepted in a dream came out of Jules Verne's book, but what happened to me this very day is not to be considered as a normal touristic experience, and I guess is never to be repeated by any of the other exotic candidate to a happy walk suggested on the booklet.

The name of the hole itself, seems easily found and I guess that in such a religious country, and southern Germans are very catholic people, so in such a place, it seems absolutely normal that the enormous and marvelous hole let the villagers think of some infernal retreat, some kind of hellish gate open on the underground worlds and their nightmare's creatures. I like to repeat how scientific is my work and how pragmatic is my process applied to the facts I'm telling you about now. As an historian, it is always to be kept in mind that superstitions and medieval believes regarding some supernatural beings are still accurate in most inhabited buildings, even third millennium skyscrapers.

So, let us now consider the boy himself, as a living subject under our binoculars. He's thirteen and a half, the hormones started doing their chrysalids' work inside his veins and the worm is very slowly turning to an adult. Nothing specific is to be known, during his first years, he's been through some infantile diseases, grew up in a loving family, his road open by two elder brothers. He's got many friends, enjoys playing out, soccer and bicycle. Yes, thing to notice, one day, with a group of children in woods, he's seen some small dwarves, elves, in fact “men, thirty centimeters high”, wearing “red sweater and bonnets”, he was sure of that, and of course, he took his parents to the tunnel where his parents not believing this “ rubbish talking”, tried and explained him how rabbits and other animals, dig those tunnels and live inside, explaining the footsteps printings in front of them. Otherwise, he spent many holidays on the seaside, and is aware of some unbelievable but true facts, he was witness of, but adults would laugh at him for. So he lives like many other kids, melting reality with a onirical world and is in love with Virginie, a lovely hazel eyed girl he met at school when he was seven.

Now, I gave you the profile of our study, let consider the facts as they are felt inside his young brain.

I then thought about the prehistorical pictures showing hunt, horses and buffaloes, and on this point was a bit disappointed by the skeleton of bears who had come inside the cave to protect themselves and were imprisoned by some fallen stones. Though it happened thousand years before, it was not that exciting for I had already seen the gigantic bone fossils of Tyrannosaurus in Paris, it was more something like the horror train where ghosts where more laughable than frightening, “poor bear” I thought looking the white skeleton with its large skull and the desperately empty thorax. I touched the bones to feel if they were real. Strange that we were to look at a doom bear's skeleton as if it was a monstrous creature.

And there, we may consider that begins a relation between the legends of the antique dragons and their treasures deeply hidden inside mountains, behind their spell walls, bedded on jewels and gems brought to them in adoration and desire to keep in peace. Germany is a land of dark legends for someone bred in Greek and Roman mythology. Anyway, these dragons stories whatever they can be, had a real source that maybe related to antique wizards or some witchcraft society playing with old bones from dinosaurs or whales they bought to passing by caravans.

Pottenstein is a village built on escarped rocks in a deep valley where no army would dare to move without suspecting the possible attack of an enemy troup that would have been invisible under the dark trees and the many caves. Through the centuries, villagers had developed a local culture of its own, including its own legends. It is hard for a foreigner, and therefore for an alien to catch all the meaning of a location such as the Devil's hole in their common mind. We've got to keep in mind that our subject never came before to this location and will never be back there. It brings us to the heart of the story.

As you can guess, pupils love this kind of visit when they can do on their own some jokes, hiding themselves in unlighted squares and suddenly shouting like beast getting out to eat the poor girls who were discussing how beautiful nature had made those “rocks and smooth stones”. Our young friend doesn't share those games. In the stairs, he feels like something, he doesn't have any other word, that a “ something” might had get inside him without him knowing exactly what it is. So the class goes on its way, listening to the music or comments in the different rooms they're accessing to and half an hour after entering, they all get out on the upper terrace, a bright sun exploding in their underground creature's eyes. I can't say more excepted that getting out was quite like a liberation, like getting some fresh air after a long time under the water surface. What else? In the middle of the pupils, there exactly in front of me, a girl, I knew nothing about before. And I instinctively love her. In fact, as I come to the light and discover her face, with the blond hair and the small wave of hair on the top of her forehead, Madonna like, I am in an unexpected but true love, I can't help going on. Symptoms are evident to my good friends who immediately ask me if I need to breath some fresh air for my face is pure scarlet and I look like I'm not the same. One of them offers me a can of coke, and though I emptied it in three seconds, I still can feel inside my chest a fire burning and increasing as I'm looking at her. Of course, we are perfectly strangers one to another and we even didn't share any friend or acquaintance, but love is declared.

We still had two days to discover the landscapes and an old town made of castles and old opera houses. I remember those hours but like behind a curtain my life turning to a adoration of this girl, I had fallen in love with, or without, and I would like to get in touch with. Teenagers usually have some sudden passion for one another inflaming their heart, breaking their souls, taking them here and there after some idealistic being they'd like their lover to be, but in this case, we are confronted to a more interesting case that reveals his nature the following day at night when I can't sleep in the bus and the boy is to write down his feeling. Part, to share his impression and have a possibility to look in the mirror, part, to reveal the inner revolution that has begun in the deeper dungeon of his soul.

In the following month, and the following years, our friend is gonna become a writer, a man whose life cannot be without paper and pen. Everyday, he uses the pen to try and paint the reality he 's confronted to, everyday, he's learning more about a forgotten art, a primary but definitively secret fire.

So, it happens that our boy might have “something” in his blood that came from the wet cave and its millenarian decorum. I've asked some scientists of my friends who have declared that due to the specific atmosphere and the quite constant temperature inside a cave, and objecting though there were thousand people inside it each year, it might have happened that one of the pillars degraded by the human respiration might have freed some prehistorical virus. And it would have find a host in this young human.

It is precisely where I want to come, talking today about the Devil's hole: during centuries, this place known by the villagers of Pottenstein was a proscribed zone of the land, were hallucinations and devilish thoughts get onto normal shepherd or visitors sitting under the protection of the stone ceiling during a storm. It seems, and remember that we're scientists, that some experience through the ages might have decided the men not to use such a place during centuries, that it might have been for some good reasons, that we will call a virus.

On the other hand, we might consider that love was the key of this nonsense story and that out a boy and for the rest of his life would flow out a mysterious source emanated from this point after a too long sleep, alone in the darkness as it is written on a post card sold there: “The Devil's hole is a denomination from the Middle Age when the hole previously known as Pan's cave was modified. The Spirit of Wood, Pan, pursuing a maid would have been imprisoned inside it by the exhausted villagers would could not tolerate anymore his daily wife's abduction. Since then it's a tradition for women never to walk alone in the miles around ”