"Clumsy
treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said. "They bore into Silbury Hill and
expect to find a mummified chief or something sensational of 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.
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