We sowed our corn in blood here. We had
strange fancies about the stars. Those we brought with us out of the
south where the stars are brighter. And what like were those wooden gods
of ours? I don't remember.... But I could easily persuade myself that I
had been here before."
They stood on the crest of the ancient wall and the setting sun cast
long shadows of them athwart a field of springing wheat.
"Perhaps we shall come here again," the doctor carried on Sir Richmond's
fancy; "after another four thousand years or so, with different names
and fuller minds. And then I suppose that this ditch won't be the riddle
it is now."
"Life didn't seem so complicated then," Sir Richmond mused. "Our muddles
were unconscious. We drifted from mood to mood and forgot. There was
more sunshine then, more laughter perhaps, and blacker despair. Despair
like the despair of children that can weep itself to sleep.... It's
over.... Was it battle and massacre that ended that long afternoon here?
Or did the woods catch fire some exceptionally dry summer, leaving black
hills and famine? Or did strange men bring a sickness--measles, perhaps,
or the black death? Or was it cattle pest? Or did we just waste our
woods and dwindle away before the new peoples that came into the land
across the southern sea? I can't remember.
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