The Hunchback's heavenly choir

Walking through the Latin Quarter on a Saturday night, a French autumn breeze brushing the river, we turned a corner towards my favourite church, Notre Dame. A closer look revealed people were drifting inside, slowly, as if in a dream. It was dark, the cathedral was lit up. How exciting.

We quickened our pace and slipped beneath the gargoyles and carved curves above the Portal of the Last Judgement.

And inside, at the front of the church, was a choir dressed in white.

"They're singing," came a whisper. Indeed they were. It was one of those moments when you feel like you're in a film.

A conductor stood with her back to us and waved her right hand at 30-odd singers, in traditional dress, shoulder to shoulder, in front of a golden cross.

She waved and they sang some sacred sounds that floated through the air, our hair and into the shadows of the nave.

If a Hunchback lurked in the rafters, he was smiling beatifically, lulled and dumbfound in his heavenly seat, captivated and enchanted in the murky light of Notre Dame.

There was no need to understand the words to these songs that flew in on the wind from Iceland, a country in need of some spiritual succour at the moment, I would think.
Meaning was irrelevant with this sound that soared into the cloisters, way above our heads.

And when they'd finished, they left their perch in the crossing of this austere and beautiful building and filed outside and, as I was photographing the shadowed columns, they filed back in. In their pigtails and aprons, still singing they walked around me, stiff backed and floating but still singing, covering me with their sound.

Time stopped. Some pure moments you just stumble upon.

Outside the sign read:

Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris.
Samedi 15 Novembre 2008, 20h
Audition
Musique Sacree Islandaise.
Hamrahlidarkorinn de Reykjavik.
direction, Thorgerdur Ingolfsdottir

Catch them if you can. Just try to make sure it's in Notre-Dame de Paris, in the half light of a November night.