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. Who would carve these lumps of
quartzite when one could carve good oak? Or beech--a most carvable wood.
Especially when one's sharpest chisel was a flint. "It's wood we ought
to look for," said Sir Richmond. "Wood and fibre." He declared that
these people had their tools of wood, their homes of wood, their gods
and perhaps their records of wood. "A peat bog here, even a few feet of
clay, might have pickled some precious memoranda.... No such luck....
Now in Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron
age--half way to our own times--quite beautifully pickled."

Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir Richmond nor
the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the riddle why the ditc