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. 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