Twenty kilometres from the workshop where Louis and Orianne work is the troglodyte city of Ouplistsikhe, one of the oldest human settlements in the Caucasus, carved out of the rock in the Iron Age. The city developed as early as the first millennium BC, and enjoyed a golden age from 600 BC to 337 AD, the date of Georgia's conversion to Christianity. The city was one of the most important pagan sanctuaries in the region and a central staging post during the Middle Ages on the Silk Roads.

I'm Ombeline and I'm working on a documentary about the Stone Road.

This July I joined Louis and Orianne in Georgia.

This morning, as I arrived in Ouplistsikhe, I was a little frustrated. Three thousand years of history and mankind's first technical discoveries lay before me, but I could hardly grasp the full extent of the miracle. The site is absolutely sublime. Masses of stone open up, cut into each other and melt into one another like chunks of liquid rock, and arches carved out of the material offer breathtaking views over the landscape. It's magnificent and I'm happy to see it. But I can't quite connect with it. Kids in brightly coloured clothes are jumping up and down and shouting, hanging on the hands of their parents who are treading on these millennia-old jewels, and the guide gives me a succession of dates that feel like a dead language. Dead stone. I need to rediscover the feeling of stone, of an archaic memory, perhaps still inscribed in my body, a life within me that I sense and whose path I am trying to discover.

It's hot, the sun's rays are falling straight onto the sandstone surface and reverberating. I'm tired. I settle down inside a cave chosen at random, with no sign. The darkness soothes me. I take out my camera. And suddenly I see her. This thousand-year-old grandmother, all stained and cracked. A cut-out gorge forms a tunnel of light in front of me. The rays reflect off the walls and draw white circles in different parts of the cellar. On my right too, Roman-style pillars have been crudely carved.

From top to bottom: Detail of the rock at the Ouplistsikhe site; Louis Dutrieux and Ombeline Tamboise in front of the church at Ruisi

I feel in touch with the mystery of our human journey. From a wall that strongly resembles a womb, with all the fusion and liquidity that implies, to the separation that implies the creation of forms, the use of art and language. From the belly of this big, soft bear to the presence of Apollo, there is the whole journey of discovery, exchange and relations between cultures. Who are all these men who have worked for centuries to build this Roman column? What were they thinking? What did they love? How did they conceive the world and what links led them to this choice?

I talk to Louis and Orianne about this. I also tell them that I would have liked to have seen some unique architecture here, typical of the region, and that I don't understand the choice of using Roman codes.

But... perhaps it's simply a question of the know-how and technical knowledge of the time, they tell me. Builders constantly drew inspiration from each other and from the advances of their contemporaries. We took what worked best. We had to make something that held together and offered elegant volumes. The gap between my aesthetic aspirations and the concrete reasons put forward by Louis and Orianne made me dizzy. I realised the extent of technical knowledge and its implications for artistic development. I think of the long march of humanity from Uplistsikhe to our glass and iron buildings. I realise how contact with matter and its resistance has unfolded human inventiveness. Matter confronts us, awakens the immensity of our desires, frustrates us. And from this confrontation springs the singularity of an era.

I leave the cave moved. I see once again the long curves and precipices carved by the rock, and the interiors burnt out by the various invaders who grazed their flocks in the cellars, with no respect for the richness of the past.

And I say to myself that if the memory of these men, of their dreams, of their sensibility disappears, then so does the possibility of rediscovering a connection with matter.

Various views of the interior of the town of Ouplistsikhe. The three photos on the right highlight the play of light described.