Chapter Twenty-One: Stonehenge

That American from Indiana! As it was market day at Salisbury I asked
him before we parted if he had seen the market, also if they had market
days in the country towns in his State? He said he had looked in at the
market on his way back from the cathedral. No, they had nothing of the
kind in his State. Indiana was covered with a network of railroads and
electric tram lines, and all country produce, down to the last new-laid
egg, was collected and sent off and conveyed each morning to the towns,
where it was always market day.

How sad! thought I. Poor Indiana, that once had wildness and romance
and memories of a vanished race, and has now only its pretty meaningless
name!

"I suppose," he said, before getting on his bicycle, "there's nothing
beside the cathedral and Stonehenge to see in Wiltshire?"

"No, nothing," I returned, "and you'll think the time wasted in seeing
Stonehenge."

"Why?"

"Only a few old stones to see."

But he went, and I have no doubt did think the time wasted, but it would
be some consolation to him, on the other side, to be able to say that he
had seen it with his own eyes.

How did these same "few old stones" strike me on a first visit? It was
one of the greatest disillusionments I ever experienced. Stonehenge
looked small--pitiably small! For it is a fact that mere size is very
much to us, in spite of all the teachings of science. We have heard of
Stonehenge in our childhood or boyhood--that great building of unknown
origin and antiquity, its circles of stones, some still standing, others
lying prostrate, like the stupendous half-shattered skeleton of a giant
or monster whose stature reached to the clouds. It stands, we read or
were told, on Salisbury Plain. To my uninformed, childish mind a plain
anywhere was like the plain on which I was born--an absolutely level
area stretching away on all sides into infinitude; and although the
effect is of a great extent of earth, we know that we actually see
very little of it, that standing on a level plain we have a very near
horizon. On this account any large object appearing on it, such as a
horse or tree or a big animal, looks very much bigger than it would on
land with a broken surface.

Oddly enough, my impossible Stonehenge was derived from a sober
description and an accompanying plate in a sober work--a gigantic folio
in two volumes entitled "A New System of Geography", dated some time in
the eigh