Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or
bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either
a club or a stone tomahawk. The skull of the great chief inside was
entire and his skeleton unmutilated: but we could see at a glance that
the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or
prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain's tomb, and eaten
with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen. In an
inner chamber behind the chieftain's own hut we came upon yet a stranger
relic of primitive barbarism. Two complete human skeletons squatted
there in the same curious attitude as their lord's, as if in attendance
upon him in a neighbouring ante-chamber. They were the skeletons of
women--so our professional bone-scanner immediately told us--and each of
their skulls had been carefully cleft right down the middle by a single
blow from a sharp stone hatchet. But they were not the victims intended
for the _piece de resistance_ at the funeral banquet. They were clearly
the two wives of the deceased chieftain, killed on his tomb by his son
and successor, in order to accompany their lord and master in his new
life underground as they had hitherto done in his rude wooden palace on
the surface of the middle earth.
We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old cannibal savage king
(after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as
well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our
archaeological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two
years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green
as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of
the party then assembled there had been a prime actor.
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