The chief’s own skeleton lay, or rather squatted, in the most undignified attitude, in the central chamber.  His people when they put him there evidently considered that he was to sit at his ease, as he had been accustomed to do in his lifetime, in the ordinary savage squatting position, with his knees tucked up till they reached his chin, and his body resting entirely on the heels and haunches.  The skeleton was entire:  but just outside and above the stone vault we came upon a number of other bones, which told another and very different story.  Some of them were the bones of the old prehistoric short-horned ox:  others belonged to wild boars, red deer, and sundry similar animals, for the most part skulls and feet only, the relics of the savage funeral feast.  It was clear that as soon as the builders of the barrow had erected the stone chamber of their dead chieftain, and placed within it his honoured remains, they had held a great banquet on the spot, and, after killing oxen and chasing red deer, had eaten all the eatable portions, and thrown the skulls, horns, and hoofs on top of the tomb, as offerings to the spirit of their departed master.  But among these relics of the funeral baked meats there were some that specially attracted our attention—­a number of broken human skulls, mingled indiscriminately with the horns of deer and the bones of oxen.  It was impossible to look at them for a single moment, and not to recognise that we had here the veritable remains of a cannibal feast, a hundred centuries ago, on Ogbury hill-top.

Each skull was split or fractured, not clean cut, as with a sword or bullet, but hacked and hewn with some blunt implement, presumably either a club or a stone tomahawk.  The skull of the great chief inside was entire and his skeleton unmutilated:  but we could see at a glance that the remains we found huddled together on the top were those of slaves or prisoners of war, sacrificed beside the dead chieftain’s tomb, and eaten with the other products of the chase by his surviving tribesmen.  In an inner chamber behind the chieftain’s own hut we came upon yet a 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.