Looking down from
the summit of the long barrow on that bright summer morning, over the
gay group of picnicking archaeologists, it was a curious contrast to
reinstate in fancy the scene at that first installation of the Ogbury
monument. In my mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked,
yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the terraced slopes of
Ogbury Down; I saw them bear aloft, with beating of breasts and loud
gesticulations, the bent corpse of their dead chieftain; I saw the
terrified and fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and
the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the slaughter; I
saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine around the open tumulus, the
wild priest shattering with his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his
victims, the fire of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the
heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered stone
chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals around the mangled
remains of men and oxen, and finally the long task of heaping up above
the stone hut of the dead king the earthen mound that was never again to
be opened to the light of day till, ten thousand years later, we modern
Britons invaded with our prying, sacrilegious mattock the sacred privacy
of that cannibal ghost. All this passed like a vision before my mind's
eye; but I didn't mention anything of it at that particular moment to my
fellow-archaeologists, because I saw they were all much more interested
in the pigeon-pie and the funny story about an exalted personage and a
distinguished actress with which the model secretary was just then duly
entertaining them.
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