296 OGBUKY BARROWS 



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. 

 We covered up the reopened sepulchre of the old canni- 

 bal savage king (after abstracting for our local museum 

 the arrowheads and tomahawk, as well as the skull of the 

 very ancient Briton himself), and when our archaeological 

 society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two 

 years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown 

 again as green as ever, and not a sign remained of the 

 sacrilegious act in which one of the party then assembled 

 there had been a prime actor. Looking down from the 

 summit of the long barrow on that bright summer 

 morning, over the gay group of picnicking archaeologists, it 

 was a curious contrast to reinstate in fancy the scene at 

 that first installation of the Ogbury monument. In my 

 mind's eye I saw once more the howling band of naked, 

 yellow-faced and yellow-limbed savages surge up the 

 terraced slopes of Ogbury Down ; I saw them bear aloft, 

 with beating of breasts and loud gesticulations, the bent 

 corpse of their dead chieftain ; I saw the terrified and 

 fainting wives haled along by thongs of raw oxhide, and 

 the weeping prisoners driven passively like sheep to the 

 slaughter ; I saw the fearful orgy of massacre and rapine 

 around the open tumulus, the wild priest shattering with 

 his gleaming tomahawk the skulls of his victims, the fire 

 of gorse and low brushwood prepared to roast them, the 

 heads and feet flung carelessly on top of the yet uncovered 

 stone chamber, the awful dance of blood-stained cannibals 

 around the mangled remains of men and oxen, and finally 

 the long task of heaping up above the stone hut of the 

 dead king the earthen mound that was never again to be 



