308 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



it seemed remote, timeless, brooding. I poked around, marveled, and 

 read everything I could find about it. 



The word that originally struck me in the literature was "coinci- 

 dence." The one thing that all laymen know about Stonehenge — that 

 if you stand in the center on a clear Midsummer morning (around 

 the summer solstice, June 22) and look down "the avenue" you will 

 see the sun rise almost exactly over the distant "heelstone" — was 

 called a coincidence by most archeologists. Beware, it leads to "fruit- 

 less conjecture," warned one authority. As an astronomer I could not 

 help feeling that such an alinement of the most important direction 

 of the structure with the point of sunrise of the longest day of the 

 year might well have been deliberate. I wondered. 



Then, early in 1961, I had occasion to mention Stonehenge in my 

 book Sflendor in the Sky: 



... If the axis of the temple had been chosen at random the probability 

 of selecting this point by accident would be less than one in five hundred. 

 Now if the builders of Stonehenge had wished simply to mark the sun- 

 rise they needed no more than two stones. Yet hundreds of tons of 

 volcanic rock were carved and placed in position. ... It must have been 

 the focal point for ancient Britons. . . . The stone blocks are mute, but 

 perhaps some day, by a chance discovery, we will learn their secrets. 



As I wrote those words, the thought that had been nebulous in my 

 head for some 7 years suddenly crystallized: something should be 

 done. So that summer I went there again, and my wife and I stalked 

 the Stonehenge sunrise. We made base camp in an Amesbury hotel 

 close by, and a few days before Midsummer (alas, w^e couldn't be there 

 on The Day itself), we went over. Not without overtones of light 

 comedy: sunrise was due about 4:30 (daylight time); we had ne- 

 glected to tell the hotel we would be going out so early, and we hadn't 

 paid our bill ; so with exceeding f urtiveness we tiptoed down the long 

 dark hall, past the loudly ticking grandfather clock, and we started 

 our car quietly. 



Stonehenge stood black against the lightening sky. I climbed the 

 barbed wire fence (which defeated my wife), placed myself at the 

 center of the circles,^ and made ready my 8-millimeter telephoto movie 

 camera. And suddenly, there it was — the first red flash of the sun, 

 rising just one-half a diameter to the right of the heelstone. For a 

 moment I was lost in time, bemused, trying to go back 3,500 years to 

 those other sunrises, similarly witnessed by what other people, for 

 what other purpose? But quickly I returned to the 20th century, 

 because I felt surrounded by questions calling out for answer: Why 



2 The Inner circle consists of five trilithons set in a horseshoe pattern ; the next, tra- 

 ditionally called the Sarcen (Saracen?) circle, is a ring of upright boulders, some with 

 lintels on the top; the outer or Aubrey circle (named for the 17th-century investigator 

 John Aubrey) Is marked by 56 equally spaced holes and mounds. 



