Thanks to all for the comments. You'll forgive me if I group the answers.

Correction : I said that the bottom wall used the "blotches" pattern. This
pattern has been removed from Megapov 0.4 (I created the wall with 0.3 and
switched later to 0.4), probably because it was redundant with the "crackle
solid" pattern, which works in the same way.
I posted the (corrected) stone wall generation file in povray.text.scene-files
for those interested.

About render time and memory usage : at 3200 X 2400 (with antialiasing), it
took around 16 hours on a PII 350 and used 190MB of RAM. Not so much if you
consider the 250 millions of smooth triangles in the scene. With no
antialiasing and no area light it even runs very fast : there's almost nothing
but height-fields and meshes in that scene.
The only trick is that meshes are very efficient objects in povray memorywise
: using one mesh or 1000 copies of it is (almost) the same. In fact this is
this particular property that prompted me to do the scene. All you need is a
utility that gives you access to the mesh vertices and normals, in that case
the association of Warp's Mesh compressor and of Chris Colefax's mesh macros.

Here's a temporary link to a larger version (1600*1200, jpg, 1 MB)
It's a jpg with 1/5 compression ratio. Because of the high level of detail,
pngs remains too big (several MB).
Beware: the image is still 1 megabyte big !!!!
http://www.inapg.inra.fr/dsa/temp/huma21sm.jpg
You'll see that some of the people are imbedded in the wall, which makes the
scene even creepier.

G.

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