h
was inside and not outside the great wall.

"And what was our Mind like in those days?" said Sir Richmond. "That, I
suppose, is what interests you. A vivid childish mind, I guess, with not
a suspicion as yet that it was Man ruling his Planet or anything of that
sort."

The doctor pursed his lips. "None," he delivered judicially. "If one
were able to recall one's childhood--at the age of about twelve or
thirteen--when the artistic impulse so often goes into abeyance and one
begins to think in a troubled, monstrous way about God and Hell, one
might get something like the mind of this place."

"Thirteen. You put them at that already?... These people, you think,
were religious?"

"Intensely. In that personal way that gives death a nightmare terror.
And as for the fading of the artistic impulse, they've left not a trace
of the paintings and drawings and scratchings of the Old Stone people
who came before them."

"Adults with the minds of thirteen-year-old children. Thirteen-year-old
children with the strength of adults--and no one to slap them or tell
them not to.... After all, they probably only thought of death now and
then. And they never thought of fuel. They supposed there was no end to
that. So they used up their woods and kept goats to nibble and kill the
new undergrowth. DID these people have goats?"

"I don't know," said the doctor. "So little is known."

"Very like children they must have been. The same unending days. They
must have thought that the world went on for ever-just as they knew
it--like my damned Committee does.... With their fuel wasting away and
the climate changing imperceptibly, century by century.... Kings and
important men followed one another here for centuries and centuries....
They had lost their past and had no idea of any future.. .. They had
forgotten how they came into the land... When I was a child I believed
that my father's garden had been there for ever....

"This is very like trying to remember some game one played when one was
a child. It is like coming on something that one built up with bricks
and stones in some forgotten part of the garden...."

"The life we lived here," said the doctor, "has left its traces in
traditions, in mental predispositions, in still unanalyzed fundamental
ideas."

"Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond. "Presently we
shall remember a lot more about all this. We shall remember what it was
like to live in this place, and the