第27章 THE FIFTH(4)

The two gentlemen smoked for some time in a slightly uncomfortable silence.Dr.Martineau cleared his throat twice and lit a second cigar.They then agreed to admire the bridge and think well of Maidenhead.Sir Richmond communicated hopeful news about his car, which was to arrive the next morning before ten--he'd just ring the fellow up presently to make sure--and Dr.Martineau retired early and went rather thoughtfully to bed.The spate of Sir Richmond's confidences, it was evident, was over.

Section 4

Sir Richmond's car arrived long before ten, brought down by a young man in a state of scared alacrity--Sir Richmond had done some vigorous telephoning before turning in,--the Charmeuse set off in a repaired and chastened condition to town, and after a leisurely breakfast our two investigators into the springs of human conduct were able to resume their westward journey.They ran through scattered Twyford with its pleasant looking inns and through the commonplace urbanities of Reading, by Newbury and Hungerford's pretty bridge and up long wooded slopes to Savernake forest, where they found the road heavy and dusty, still in its war-time state, and so down a steep hill to the wide market street which is Marlborough.They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest artificial mound in Europe.They left the car by the roadside and clambered to the top and were very learned and inconclusive about the exact purpose of this vast heap of chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before the temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.

Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road into the wonder of Avebury.They found a clean little inn there kept by pleasant people, and they garaged the car in the cowshed and took two rooms for the night that they might the better get the atmosphere of the ancient place.Wonderful indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already two thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a great wall of earth with its ditch most strangely on its inner and not on its outer side; and within this enclosure gigantic survivors of the great circles of unhewn stone that, even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete.A whole village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for the most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall is sufficient to embrace them all with their gardens and paddocks; four cross-roads meet at the village centre.There are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part the destruction was already done before the MAYFLOWER sailed.

To the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons change.Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that forgotten world.These trackways, these green roads of England, these roads already disused when the Romans made their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn, and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.

The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed the shadow cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up the down to the northward to get a general view of the village, had tea and smoked round the walls again in the warm April sunset.The matter of their conversation remained prehistoric.Both were inclined to find fault with the archaeological work that had been done on the place."Clumsy treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said."They bore into Silbury Hill and expect to find a mummified chief or something sensational of that sort, and they don't, and they report nothing.They haven't sifted finely enough; they haven't thought subtly enough.These walls of earth ought to tell what these people ate, what clothes they wore, what woods they used.Was this a sheep land then as it is now, or a cattle land? Were these hills covered by forests? I don't know.These archaeologists don't know.Or if they do they haven't told me, which is just as bad.I don't believe they know.

"What trade came here along these tracks? So far as I know, they had no beasts of burthen.But suppose one day someone were to find a potsherd here from early Knossos, or a fragment of glass from Pepi's Egypt."The place had stirred up his imagination.He wrestled with his ignorance as if he thought that by talking he might presently worry out some picture of this forgotten world, without metals, without beasts of burthen, without letters, without any sculpture that has left a trace, and yet with a sense of astronomical fact clear enough to raise the great gnomon of Silbury, and with a social system complex enough to give the large and orderly community to which the size of Avebury witnesses and the traffic to which the green roads testify.

The doctor had not realized before the boldness and liveliness of his companion's mind.Sir Richmond insisted that the climate must have been moister and milder in those days; he covered all the downlands with woods, as Savernake was still covered; beneath the trees he restored a thicker, richer soil.These people must have done an enormous lot with wood.This use of stones here was a freak.It was the very strangeness of stones here that had made them into sacred things.One thought too much of the stones of the Stone Age.