Chapter 23: The Longbarrow
No birds were singing, the skylarks and swallows of the day before were silent; all was quiet, cool, muted, softened as if the three men were making their way up through the fields towards West Kennet Longbarrow were treading through cotton wool.
The Kennet valley was so thick with spring mist that Silbury hill had appeared only momentarily as they passed, a flat grey featureless hump visible for a moment when the slight breeze parted the mist, but it was soon obscured and left behind as the friends crossed the road and took the path towards West Kennet.
The grass was cool and wet, soaking the men’s shoes and trouser bottoms. Lewis was grumbling somewhere ahead; Tolkien was, as usual, lagging behind. He stopped for a moment to re-tie his sodden bootlace, squeezing the water from it, then while he was crouched down he paused to examine the flowers peeking through the grass: meadowsweet a speedwell.
He looked ahead to see the wraith-like shadowed forms of his friends merge into the whiteness and disappear; he felt suddenly alone…
Alone and palely loitering…. He thought to himself.
Tolkien felt no alarm; in fact he took a deep, slow breath, relieved to be alone for a spell; Lewis and Barfield had been in conversation since they had left the church, but Tolkien had been trying to think through the revelations of the night before; trying to organise his thoughts into some kind of order.
He stood upright and went to move onwards, suddenly not sure if he was facing in the same direction as he had been before he’d stopped to examine the flowers. Nevertheless, he knew he had been walking slowly uphill after they had crossed the small bridge over the Kennet, whose waters he was sure he could just make out chuckling behind him… so he strode forward.
There didn’t seem to be much of a path but nevertheless he continued through the thick grass and clover, knowing that the tomb that was their destination that morning, stood on the brow of the hill – but when he finally reached the crest the ground was flat; somehow he had misjudged his ascent – and so he called out to his friends; nothing was returned. The question now, he said to himself, is whether I am too far east or west of the tomb; he guessed west and so turned eastwards along the ridge.
The mist seemed to be moving slightly more up on the ridge; tearing past in odd eddies hardly strong enough to be called gusts; the grasses at his feet, a drab brown interspersed with fresh green shoots, gave no indication of a path, fading to wan a few metres each side. Tolkien’s steps quickened as he became more and more disoriented.
He called again and heard nothing;
I could be walking these hills a thousand years ago or more, he said; a delicious thrill went through him at the thought; he imagined a rider on a pale horse emerging out of the white rolling fog, and confronting him in a long lost tongue… but how would I know if I had encountered a ghost or if I had slipped back in time? He asked himself.
He noticed a slight rise in the ground and so began to climb, and found himself walking along the back of what he presumed could have been the long-barrow – so named from the comet-like train of earth set at the rear of the burial chambers; the earth was lumpy and the grass more patchy, and a vague depression along the ridge suggested a path.
‘Jack? Owen?’ he shouted. His own voice seemed to return as if the mist about him were the walls of some organic shifting prison; he had lost all sense of space and distance.
‘Where the devil are they?’ he said to himself, crossly, feeling an ever so slight sense of panic.
It definitely seemed to be a path he was on – but if this was the barrow it was immense – he seemed to have been walking along this rise for a few hundred yards, or maybe that was his sense of distance being confused by the fog, now eddying and swirling about him in an eerily conscious fashion; he baulked at what seemed to be a white shape, a figure, float past him on the left, but he turned and it dissolved into air.
Hurrying now he turned and strode forward, his heart hammering in his chest, his lips, almost against his will, starting to mouth the words of an ancient charm against enchantment, gripping his walking stick before him like a sword…
wið þane sara stice, wið þane sara slege,
wið þane grymma gryre,
wið ðane micela egsa þe bið eghwam lað,
and wið eal þæt lað þe in to land fare.
Sygegealdor ic begale, sigegyrd ic me wege,
wordsige and worcsige. Se me dege;
I encircle myself with this rod and entrust myself to God’s grace,
against the sore stitch, against the sore bite,
against the grim dread,
against the great fear that is loathsome to everyone,
and against all evil that enters the land.
A victory charm I sing, a victory rod I bear,
word-victory, work-victory. May they avail me;
And then he stopped in real alarm, gasping out loud as before him a huge grey form appeared in the mist, immense, wide, like a huge hooded figure towering over the back of the barrow… then another by its side… the vast blocking stones of the tomb along whose back he had, all this time, been walking.
He laughed to himself, glad he had found his goal; but where were his friends? He called again and it seemed far below him a weak strangled cry floated up through the earth from the depths of the tomb below. He walked forward and suddenly there beneath him was an open hole in the back of the barrow with a path leading down to one side… a large chamber of stones and a short dry-stone wall passage leading away from it towards the stones of the façade, and there, stood in the chamber, smoking a cigarette was Lewis; Barfield stood nearby running his hand over the lichen on the stones.
Lewis was leaning against the huge sarsen that made up the back of the chamber, but he flicked the butt away in disgust.
‘I’ve been calling you.’ Tolkien said.
‘Didn’t hear a thing.’ Lewis said and cleared his throat.
‘I’m cold and damp; this place is giving me the shivers; I almost thought you were some spirit when you peered over the edge then!’ Lewis visibly shivered.
‘I’m not happy here. The place seems somehow…’ he struggled to think of the words. ‘…haunted; no – lived in, perhaps, as if some spirit dwells here that never went away… It makes no sense, the chamber has been long empty yet I still feel there are bones about… shall we go?’
‘We only just got here!’ Tolkien protested, walking around the hollow to the path that lead into the chamber.
‘It’s like winter has returned; dame kind is playing with us, gentlemen!’ he said, as a flurry of mist drifted over the chamber sending cool air downwards.
Barfield was investigating the eastern end of the passage;
‘It seems to continue this way – no doubt to the façade; and I suppose it was all once roofed as Stukeley seems to show it… but some treasure-hunter has dug in from the top in the intervening years, not able to move the facing stones…’
‘I wonder whether it was worth it? What ancient treasures were lurking here, do you think?’ Lewis asked. ‘Dragon-guarded gold?’
As if my some strange synchronicity at the mention of gold the pale disc of the sun suddenly appeared to the south, as the mist seemed to shift and change direction; it vanished again but a few moments later the disc appeared again, though now a pale silver, weak and powerless. The three friends looked round them as the chamber brightened, the creeping sense of dread having suddenly departed.
A few minutes later the friends were seated on the top of the barrow leaning against the facing stones as the mist thinned, borne away on an increasingly strong breeze; the sky was now blue above them and the sun too bright to directly look at; the grass around them had turned from a sickly acid green to a warm spring green, and, despite the breeze, the day was warming.
‘Oh I say, look!’ Barfield said, pointing to the north; above the mist the crest of Silbury stood proud in the sun, like a flat topped island in a sea of steaming milk; as they watched they noticed three figures emerge from the mist a few hundred yards down the path below the barrow. Heading the trio was Alexander Keiller, while behind him trod the young man with glasses and black hair who had received the blow on the head from the falling piece of tree root during the explosions in the henge ditch the day before; he was deep in conversation with a taller, heavily bearded man, who appeared to be in his seventies or eighties – his face heavily tanned, giving him the appearance of some Biblical patriarch – a sense compounded by the way the younger man, in his twenties, seemed to look up at him with a mixture of respect and awe.
‘We meet again!’ Keiller grinned as Tolkien, Barfield and Lewis clambered down from the mound to greet the new arrivals.
‘May I introduce you to my assistant, Stuart Piggott…’ the young man smiled broadly and proffered a hand to the friends.
‘…and Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie.’ The old man nodded, and shook their hands, peering under his heavy white brows, his face remaining stern.
‘My word!’ said Lewis. ‘This is a lucky coincidence. I was only last week reading of your discovery of the Merneptah Stele.’
If Lewis had expected a friendly conversation amongst peers to ensue he was to be disappointed, as Flinders-Petrie merely nodded his head in what might have been taken as a gracious acceptance of some compliment. Instead he turned to Piggott and addressed him on some obscure question of Bronze Age axe typology, seemingly the topic they had been engaged in on the walk up.
Keiller flashed his schoolboy-grin. ‘Sir Flinders-Petrie is taking time out of a series of talks in London especially to see the re-erection of the first stone in the north-west quadrant tomorrow; we’re very honoured to have him here. He’s been such an inspiration; I read his accounts of his excavations in Egypt and the Near East as a young man, and I can honestly say if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here today! Will you be here to see it?’ he asked the friends.
Tolkien looked towards his companions not sure how to answer. They had kind of left the question of walking schedules up in the air when they had left Church Cottage that morning, having decided that they hadn’t yet exhausted Avebury’s many attractions, and that The Red Lion served uncommonly good beer. Tolkien expected Lewis to answer, but the latter merely shrugged, cleared his throat, and announced it was a possibility.
The same high-colour lay on Lewis’s cheeks as at breakfast – perhaps not a shaving rash after all, and not sunburn; he seemed quite flushed, and now Tolkien thought about it, he had seemed less talkative since they had left the church.
‘Everything okay, Jack?’ Tolkien asked.
Jack forced a smile. ‘I think that last cigarette may have dried my throat a bit; I’m feeling a little hoarse; a bit off colour in general really, now I think of it. Perhaps we should stay another night.’
Barfield put a hand on his friend’s arm.
‘I’m sure a lunchtime beer would sort out that throat.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. I don’t really feel like climbing Silbury Hill today. It’s something about this place, it’s put me out of sorts.’ and he visibly shivered.
Tolkien turned and looked up at the massive facing-stones, that stood like a row of jagged teeth along the front of the barrow. He felt Piggot approach.
‘These sarsen stones, used to seal the chamber are local, were dragged here from Marlborough, where there are great numbers of them still to be found.’ Piggott stated. ‘The chamber was excavated,’ he continued ‘at least partly, in the late 1800’s – though because of the blocking stones the excavator had to come in from the top, removing the cap-stones. There’s a single chamber at the western end of the passage, and the passage itself, made of drystone walling, is thought to continue up to the portal stones, which were put in position to block the passage when the grave fell out of use.’
‘And was anything found here?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bones – from a number of individuals – disarticulated, and possibly brought from elsewhere.’
Lewis shivered again. ‘And is there anything left to be found?’
Piggot nodded. ‘It’s possible that behind the blocking stones are more chambers – we intend to dig here at some point in the future.’
‘And how do they relate to the round barrows up near the Sanctuary? Are these the same people?’ Lewis asked.
‘These are earlier – the long barrows predate the round mounds. They’re Stone Age – the occupants of the round barrows were the people who brought metalworking with them.’
‘Invaders?’ Lewis asked.
‘Very possibly. They seem to be different in stature than the long-barrow builders; a different race, perhaps.’
Piggott seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and talking not just for Tolkien and Lewis’s benefit but also for Petrie, whose Biblical form was standing on the mound nearby, brooding over the landscape. And then the great man spoke, like a man used to being listened to.
‘Invaders – yes; culture-bringers. We see the same in Egypt: a basic stone-age civilization supplanted by a far superior race.’
Tolkien bristled at the mention of superior races, but he didn’t get chance to voice his opinion as Petrie continued:
‘This type of barrow is ten-a-penny; what interests me is that’ he said, pointing his walking still back at the peak of Silbury, sailing like some green longship on the sea of mist; ‘I am convinced there is still a burial to be found somewhere in that hill…maybe the overseer of the stone circle was buried there. After the war I excavated an area near its base, hoping, as I had in Egypt, to find some kind of subterranean passageway into the mound’s interior. When you’ve finished wasting your money on re-erecting stones, Keiller, I suggest you return to the mound.’
‘Maybe once the circle is finished.’ Keiller briskly replied, frowning.
‘The Stones themselves will tell you nothing; you’re merely undoing the work of previous generations who sought to destroy them; it’s not really archaeology at all; it’s a vanity project like Evan’s creations at Knossos... But that hill – surely the nearest thing on these isles to a pyramid – that is real archaeology; imagine what might lie there… maybe some evidence of a link between this part of the world and the Near East? Hmm?’
Tolkien was amused to see a combination of bashfulness and annoyance flash across Keiller’s face.
‘Perhaps a re-excavation of the hill would be in order, too, hey, Piggott?’ Keiller said, drawing the younger man into the discussion.
‘Indeed. But here, too.’ Piggot stammered, waving a hand at the long-barrow, ‘The earlier excavation was hardly complete, and perhaps some of the fallen stones here could be put back in place.’
Petrie stood prodding the mound with his walking stick, chewing his bottom lip – before once more turning towards Silbury and pointing at the hill, twice, emphatically before striding off along the length of the barrow.
‘A great man. A great man.’ Keiller said, his eyes watering. Then his frown lifted as he turned to the three friends. ‘Oh, and we are to lunch in the Red Lion on our return, and I would be honoured if you would join us.’ Keiller said. Tolkien received the distinct impression they were being asked to swell the numbers so that Keiller wouldn’t be left alone to burden the bear-like Petrie’s ill-humour.
It was Barfield who responded in the affirmative, which surprised Tolkien, as normally it was Lewis who would leap forward, stomach first, to accept such an offer. But Jack remained quiet, eyeing the stones with something akin to mistrust or even alarm.
No birds were singing, the skylarks and swallows of the day before were silent; all was quiet, cool, muted, softened as if the three men were making their way up through the fields towards West Kennet Longbarrow were treading through cotton wool.
The Kennet valley was so thick with spring mist that Silbury hill had appeared only momentarily as they passed, a flat grey featureless hump visible for a moment when the slight breeze parted the mist, but it was soon obscured and left behind as the friends crossed the road and took the path towards West Kennet.
The grass was cool and wet, soaking the men’s shoes and trouser bottoms. Lewis was grumbling somewhere ahead; Tolkien was, as usual, lagging behind. He stopped for a moment to re-tie his sodden bootlace, squeezing the water from it, then while he was crouched down he paused to examine the flowers peeking through the grass: meadowsweet a speedwell.
He looked ahead to see the wraith-like shadowed forms of his friends merge into the whiteness and disappear; he felt suddenly alone…
Alone and palely loitering…. He thought to himself.
Tolkien felt no alarm; in fact he took a deep, slow breath, relieved to be alone for a spell; Lewis and Barfield had been in conversation since they had left the church, but Tolkien had been trying to think through the revelations of the night before; trying to organise his thoughts into some kind of order.
He stood upright and went to move onwards, suddenly not sure if he was facing in the same direction as he had been before he’d stopped to examine the flowers. Nevertheless, he knew he had been walking slowly uphill after they had crossed the small bridge over the Kennet, whose waters he was sure he could just make out chuckling behind him… so he strode forward.
There didn’t seem to be much of a path but nevertheless he continued through the thick grass and clover, knowing that the tomb that was their destination that morning, stood on the brow of the hill – but when he finally reached the crest the ground was flat; somehow he had misjudged his ascent – and so he called out to his friends; nothing was returned. The question now, he said to himself, is whether I am too far east or west of the tomb; he guessed west and so turned eastwards along the ridge.
The mist seemed to be moving slightly more up on the ridge; tearing past in odd eddies hardly strong enough to be called gusts; the grasses at his feet, a drab brown interspersed with fresh green shoots, gave no indication of a path, fading to wan a few metres each side. Tolkien’s steps quickened as he became more and more disoriented.
He called again and heard nothing;
I could be walking these hills a thousand years ago or more, he said; a delicious thrill went through him at the thought; he imagined a rider on a pale horse emerging out of the white rolling fog, and confronting him in a long lost tongue… but how would I know if I had encountered a ghost or if I had slipped back in time? He asked himself.
He noticed a slight rise in the ground and so began to climb, and found himself walking along the back of what he presumed could have been the long-barrow – so named from the comet-like train of earth set at the rear of the burial chambers; the earth was lumpy and the grass more patchy, and a vague depression along the ridge suggested a path.
‘Jack? Owen?’ he shouted. His own voice seemed to return as if the mist about him were the walls of some organic shifting prison; he had lost all sense of space and distance.
‘Where the devil are they?’ he said to himself, crossly, feeling an ever so slight sense of panic.
It definitely seemed to be a path he was on – but if this was the barrow it was immense – he seemed to have been walking along this rise for a few hundred yards, or maybe that was his sense of distance being confused by the fog, now eddying and swirling about him in an eerily conscious fashion; he baulked at what seemed to be a white shape, a figure, float past him on the left, but he turned and it dissolved into air.
Hurrying now he turned and strode forward, his heart hammering in his chest, his lips, almost against his will, starting to mouth the words of an ancient charm against enchantment, gripping his walking stick before him like a sword…
wið þane sara stice, wið þane sara slege,
wið þane grymma gryre,
wið ðane micela egsa þe bið eghwam lað,
and wið eal þæt lað þe in to land fare.
Sygegealdor ic begale, sigegyrd ic me wege,
wordsige and worcsige. Se me dege;
I encircle myself with this rod and entrust myself to God’s grace,
against the sore stitch, against the sore bite,
against the grim dread,
against the great fear that is loathsome to everyone,
and against all evil that enters the land.
A victory charm I sing, a victory rod I bear,
word-victory, work-victory. May they avail me;
And then he stopped in real alarm, gasping out loud as before him a huge grey form appeared in the mist, immense, wide, like a huge hooded figure towering over the back of the barrow… then another by its side… the vast blocking stones of the tomb along whose back he had, all this time, been walking.
He laughed to himself, glad he had found his goal; but where were his friends? He called again and it seemed far below him a weak strangled cry floated up through the earth from the depths of the tomb below. He walked forward and suddenly there beneath him was an open hole in the back of the barrow with a path leading down to one side… a large chamber of stones and a short dry-stone wall passage leading away from it towards the stones of the façade, and there, stood in the chamber, smoking a cigarette was Lewis; Barfield stood nearby running his hand over the lichen on the stones.
Lewis was leaning against the huge sarsen that made up the back of the chamber, but he flicked the butt away in disgust.
‘I’ve been calling you.’ Tolkien said.
‘Didn’t hear a thing.’ Lewis said and cleared his throat.
‘I’m cold and damp; this place is giving me the shivers; I almost thought you were some spirit when you peered over the edge then!’ Lewis visibly shivered.
‘I’m not happy here. The place seems somehow…’ he struggled to think of the words. ‘…haunted; no – lived in, perhaps, as if some spirit dwells here that never went away… It makes no sense, the chamber has been long empty yet I still feel there are bones about… shall we go?’
‘We only just got here!’ Tolkien protested, walking around the hollow to the path that lead into the chamber.
‘It’s like winter has returned; dame kind is playing with us, gentlemen!’ he said, as a flurry of mist drifted over the chamber sending cool air downwards.
Barfield was investigating the eastern end of the passage;
‘It seems to continue this way – no doubt to the façade; and I suppose it was all once roofed as Stukeley seems to show it… but some treasure-hunter has dug in from the top in the intervening years, not able to move the facing stones…’
‘I wonder whether it was worth it? What ancient treasures were lurking here, do you think?’ Lewis asked. ‘Dragon-guarded gold?’
As if my some strange synchronicity at the mention of gold the pale disc of the sun suddenly appeared to the south, as the mist seemed to shift and change direction; it vanished again but a few moments later the disc appeared again, though now a pale silver, weak and powerless. The three friends looked round them as the chamber brightened, the creeping sense of dread having suddenly departed.
A few minutes later the friends were seated on the top of the barrow leaning against the facing stones as the mist thinned, borne away on an increasingly strong breeze; the sky was now blue above them and the sun too bright to directly look at; the grass around them had turned from a sickly acid green to a warm spring green, and, despite the breeze, the day was warming.
‘Oh I say, look!’ Barfield said, pointing to the north; above the mist the crest of Silbury stood proud in the sun, like a flat topped island in a sea of steaming milk; as they watched they noticed three figures emerge from the mist a few hundred yards down the path below the barrow. Heading the trio was Alexander Keiller, while behind him trod the young man with glasses and black hair who had received the blow on the head from the falling piece of tree root during the explosions in the henge ditch the day before; he was deep in conversation with a taller, heavily bearded man, who appeared to be in his seventies or eighties – his face heavily tanned, giving him the appearance of some Biblical patriarch – a sense compounded by the way the younger man, in his twenties, seemed to look up at him with a mixture of respect and awe.
‘We meet again!’ Keiller grinned as Tolkien, Barfield and Lewis clambered down from the mound to greet the new arrivals.
‘May I introduce you to my assistant, Stuart Piggott…’ the young man smiled broadly and proffered a hand to the friends.
‘…and Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie.’ The old man nodded, and shook their hands, peering under his heavy white brows, his face remaining stern.
‘My word!’ said Lewis. ‘This is a lucky coincidence. I was only last week reading of your discovery of the Merneptah Stele.’
If Lewis had expected a friendly conversation amongst peers to ensue he was to be disappointed, as Flinders-Petrie merely nodded his head in what might have been taken as a gracious acceptance of some compliment. Instead he turned to Piggott and addressed him on some obscure question of Bronze Age axe typology, seemingly the topic they had been engaged in on the walk up.
Keiller flashed his schoolboy-grin. ‘Sir Flinders-Petrie is taking time out of a series of talks in London especially to see the re-erection of the first stone in the north-west quadrant tomorrow; we’re very honoured to have him here. He’s been such an inspiration; I read his accounts of his excavations in Egypt and the Near East as a young man, and I can honestly say if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here today! Will you be here to see it?’ he asked the friends.
Tolkien looked towards his companions not sure how to answer. They had kind of left the question of walking schedules up in the air when they had left Church Cottage that morning, having decided that they hadn’t yet exhausted Avebury’s many attractions, and that The Red Lion served uncommonly good beer. Tolkien expected Lewis to answer, but the latter merely shrugged, cleared his throat, and announced it was a possibility.
The same high-colour lay on Lewis’s cheeks as at breakfast – perhaps not a shaving rash after all, and not sunburn; he seemed quite flushed, and now Tolkien thought about it, he had seemed less talkative since they had left the church.
‘Everything okay, Jack?’ Tolkien asked.
Jack forced a smile. ‘I think that last cigarette may have dried my throat a bit; I’m feeling a little hoarse; a bit off colour in general really, now I think of it. Perhaps we should stay another night.’
Barfield put a hand on his friend’s arm.
‘I’m sure a lunchtime beer would sort out that throat.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. I don’t really feel like climbing Silbury Hill today. It’s something about this place, it’s put me out of sorts.’ and he visibly shivered.
Tolkien turned and looked up at the massive facing-stones, that stood like a row of jagged teeth along the front of the barrow. He felt Piggot approach.
‘These sarsen stones, used to seal the chamber are local, were dragged here from Marlborough, where there are great numbers of them still to be found.’ Piggott stated. ‘The chamber was excavated,’ he continued ‘at least partly, in the late 1800’s – though because of the blocking stones the excavator had to come in from the top, removing the cap-stones. There’s a single chamber at the western end of the passage, and the passage itself, made of drystone walling, is thought to continue up to the portal stones, which were put in position to block the passage when the grave fell out of use.’
‘And was anything found here?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bones – from a number of individuals – disarticulated, and possibly brought from elsewhere.’
Lewis shivered again. ‘And is there anything left to be found?’
Piggot nodded. ‘It’s possible that behind the blocking stones are more chambers – we intend to dig here at some point in the future.’
‘And how do they relate to the round barrows up near the Sanctuary? Are these the same people?’ Lewis asked.
‘These are earlier – the long barrows predate the round mounds. They’re Stone Age – the occupants of the round barrows were the people who brought metalworking with them.’
‘Invaders?’ Lewis asked.
‘Very possibly. They seem to be different in stature than the long-barrow builders; a different race, perhaps.’
Piggott seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and talking not just for Tolkien and Lewis’s benefit but also for Petrie, whose Biblical form was standing on the mound nearby, brooding over the landscape. And then the great man spoke, like a man used to being listened to.
‘Invaders – yes; culture-bringers. We see the same in Egypt: a basic stone-age civilization supplanted by a far superior race.’
Tolkien bristled at the mention of superior races, but he didn’t get chance to voice his opinion as Petrie continued:
‘This type of barrow is ten-a-penny; what interests me is that’ he said, pointing his walking still back at the peak of Silbury, sailing like some green longship on the sea of mist; ‘I am convinced there is still a burial to be found somewhere in that hill…maybe the overseer of the stone circle was buried there. After the war I excavated an area near its base, hoping, as I had in Egypt, to find some kind of subterranean passageway into the mound’s interior. When you’ve finished wasting your money on re-erecting stones, Keiller, I suggest you return to the mound.’
‘Maybe once the circle is finished.’ Keiller briskly replied, frowning.
‘The Stones themselves will tell you nothing; you’re merely undoing the work of previous generations who sought to destroy them; it’s not really archaeology at all; it’s a vanity project like Evan’s creations at Knossos... But that hill – surely the nearest thing on these isles to a pyramid – that is real archaeology; imagine what might lie there… maybe some evidence of a link between this part of the world and the Near East? Hmm?’
Tolkien was amused to see a combination of bashfulness and annoyance flash across Keiller’s face.
‘Perhaps a re-excavation of the hill would be in order, too, hey, Piggott?’ Keiller said, drawing the younger man into the discussion.
‘Indeed. But here, too.’ Piggot stammered, waving a hand at the long-barrow, ‘The earlier excavation was hardly complete, and perhaps some of the fallen stones here could be put back in place.’
Petrie stood prodding the mound with his walking stick, chewing his bottom lip – before once more turning towards Silbury and pointing at the hill, twice, emphatically before striding off along the length of the barrow.
‘A great man. A great man.’ Keiller said, his eyes watering. Then his frown lifted as he turned to the three friends. ‘Oh, and we are to lunch in the Red Lion on our return, and I would be honoured if you would join us.’ Keiller said. Tolkien received the distinct impression they were being asked to swell the numbers so that Keiller wouldn’t be left alone to burden the bear-like Petrie’s ill-humour.
It was Barfield who responded in the affirmative, which surprised Tolkien, as normally it was Lewis who would leap forward, stomach first, to accept such an offer. But Jack remained quiet, eyeing the stones with something akin to mistrust or even alarm.