ROUGH STONE MONUMENTS 



occasionally roofed with slabs, but more often 

 corbelling is employed. At a certain height each 

 succeeding course in the wall begins to project 

 inwards over the last, so that the walls, as it were, 

 lean together and finally meet to form a false 

 barrel-vault or a false dome, according as the 

 structure is rectangular or round. Occasionally, 

 when the building was wide, it was impossible 

 to corbel the walls sufficiently to make them meet. 

 In this case they were corbelled as far as possible 

 and the open space still left was covered with 

 long flat slabs. 



It has often been commented on as a matter of 

 wonder that a people living in the stone age, or 

 at the best possessing a few simple tools of metal, 

 should have been able to move and place in 

 position such enormous blocks of stone. With 

 modern cranes and traction engines all would be 

 simple, but it might have been thought that in 

 the stone age such building would be impossible. 

 Thus, for instance, in the ' temple ' of Hagiar Kim 

 in Malta, there is one block of stone which measures 

 21 feet by 9, and must weigh many tons. In 

 reality there is little that is marvellous in the 

 moving and setting up of these blocks, for the 

 tools needed are ready to the hand of every 

 savage ; but there is something to wonder at 

 and to admire in the patience displayed and in 

 the organization necessary to cany out such vast 



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