Still, when one isn't talking in geological language, ten or
twenty thousand years may be fairly considered a very long time as time
goes: and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty thousand years
have passed since the short, squat chieftain aforesaid was first
committed to his final resting-place in Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years
since, we local archaeologists--_not_ in becoming prints this
time--opened the barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we
expected, the 'stone vault' of the popular tradition, proving
conclusively that some faint memory of the original interment had clung
for all those long years around the grassy pile of that ancient tumulus.
Its centre, in fact, was occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big
Sarsen stones from the surrounding hillsides; and in the midst of the
house of death thus rudely constructed lay the mouldering skeleton of
its original possessor--an old prehistoric Mongoloid chieftain. When I
stood for the first moment within that primaeval palace of the dead,
never before entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I
must own, something like a burglar, something like a body-snatcher,
something like a resurrection man, but most of all like a happy
archaeologist.
The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in fact, a buried
cromlech, covered all over (until we opened it) by the earth of the
barrow. Almost every cromlech, wherever found, was once, I believe, the
central chamber of just such a long barrow: but in some instances wind
and rain have beaten down and washed away the surrounding earth (and
then we call it a 'Druidical monument'), while in others the mound still
encloses its original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric
tumulus).
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