Last month I went to a particularly cavelike theater (the basement walls, outside the bathrooms, were covered with synthetic stone) to see ''Cave of Forgotten Dreams,'' Werner Herzog's 3-D documentary about cave paintings. The film is a rapturous tour of the Chauvet cave in southern France, a dramatic pocket of rock that was discovered, in 1994, to contain the oldest known paintings in the history of the world: portraits, up to 32,000 years old, of bison, mammoths, reindeer, lions, bears and woolly rhinoceroses -- the improbable megafauna of southern France during the last ice age.

Aside from the art covering its undulating walls, Chauvet is a totally alien landscape: barren, inhospitable, forbidden. It is, like many caves, both rugged and delicate. Herzog's access was severely restricted. He was allowed only three crew members and four hours of filming at a time; he had to assemble his cameras inside the cave and shoot everything from a narrow metal walkway. The landscape he records is simultaneously terrifying and magical. Glittering stalactites and stalagmites stretch toward one another, through the darkness, in epochal slow motion. The space is dominated by the remnants of cave bears: scratches on the walls, tracks on the floor, bones everywhere. The back of the cave is full of poisonous gas. It is not, in other words, a place for humans.

The miracle, however, is that humans were here. Watching the film in the dark cavern of a theater in New York City, on a 21st-century Monday, surrounded by contemporary Homo sapiens I knew nothing about, enduring Herzogian blasts of New Age music and heavily accented spoken-word poetry (''Are we today the crocodiles who look back into the abyss of time?''), I found myself most fascinated not by the paintings themselves -- although these were gorgeous and strange -- but by the more mundane evidence of human life in the cave. There's the footprint of an 8-year-old boy next to the footprint of a wolf. There are black stripes where, 28,000 years ago, visitors scraped their torches against the cave wall to rekindle them. Near the entrance there's a cluster of red dots that turn out to be palm prints, made roughly 30,000 years ago, by a 6-foot-tall person with a crooked pinkie finger.

That crooked pinkie, in particular, stuck in my mind. It's an incidental detail that conjures, uncannily, a whole person. It creates an intimacy that, given the time scale involved, is hard to believe. In the face of the truly sublime, the mundane often takes on an extraordinary power.

I saw Herzog's film just after the death of Osama bin Laden, and like everything that happened then, the movie seemed to bend around that event. The mythology of Bin Laden, of course, had much to do with caves. He was supposed to have been living in them since 2001, foiling history's most technologically advanced superpower with the most archaic tool possible: a hole in a rock. He was often portrayed as a Stone Age supervillain, plotting our destruction from the depths of his mountain lair. (It's interesting that Bin Laden did not see himself that way. In ''The Bin Ladens,'' Steve Coll writes that he ''mocked his Western adversaries for misunderstanding him as a premodern fanatic, a bearded loner in a faraway cave; he saw himself, instead, as a master of global technology and change.'')

Caves, in this mythology, were deeply anti-American: beyond surveillance, devoid of information, immune to cultivation or colonization or commercialism. Tora Bora was a negative image of Manhattan: a city built into the ground instead of rising up dramatically from it. And Bin Laden was Tora Bora. The elaborate network of reinforced caves -- falsely rumored to include its own hospital -- had been built at his instigation, largely with his family's construction equipment, even occasionally with him at the wheel of a bulldozer, personally hollowing out the perilous terrain.

It was fascinating, then, to learn that Bin Laden's actual habitation, at least for the last five or six years, was a different kind of cave: a walled, three-story concrete bunker largely disconnected from the world.

Reading the newspaper coverage after his death, I found myself ravenous for details of Bin Laden's secret life. I recognized, in this, an echo: it was the same feeling I had watching Herzog's film. Once again, the most trivial details were the most thrilling: that Bin Laden took a walk every day in the courtyard; that one of his couriers regularly brought back Coca-Cola; that he cured his kidney ailments with (as The Times reported) ''homemade remedies, including watermelon''; that some of the 100 thumb drives the Seal team confiscated were loaded with pornography; that Bin Laden left behind handwritten notebooks about a major attack. (I found myself wondering less about the details of the attack than about what Bin Laden's handwriting looked like.) And then there was that mesmerizing silent video of Bin Laden sitting on his living room floor, channel-surfing.