gigantic survivors of the great circles of unhewn stone that, even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete.  A whole village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for the most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall is sufficient to embrace them all with their gardens and paddocks; four cross-roads meet at the village centre.  There are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part the destruction was already done before the Mayflower sailed.  To the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons change.  Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that forgotten world.  These trackways, these green roads of England, these roads already disused when the Romans made their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn, and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.

The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed the shadow cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up the down to the northward to get a general view of the village, had tea and smoked round the walls again in the warm April sunset.  The matter of their conversation remained prehistoric.  Both were inclined to find fault with the archaeological work that had been done on the place.  “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.