Page 119 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

THE SUN TEMPLE

1860-1790 B.C.

T

J_he tow-headed children, bom in the shadow of
the mountains of northwest England at the time when Abraham

was seventy years old, must have played with axes before they
could walk. On the long trek up the Langdale valley they had
been carried on their mothers’ backs, or had ridden gleefully

on the sledges pulled by the menfolk or by oxen. They had
traveled up from the wattle village by the lakeside, following the

track through the woods beside the tarns of the lower valley;
and then they had left behind them the scattered oak trees, and
come out into the tussocky waste of heather and cotton grass

and sphagnum swamp, choosing the better path along the slopes
of sheep-cropped turf which steepened to the crags below Dun­

geon Ghyll and the Pikes.
Where the valley turned to the north they had sighted the
summer encampment, with the smoke from the fires rising from

among the skin tents towards the low grey clouds which al­
most touched the top of the Langdale Pikes and obscured the

summit of Bowfell across the dale. (Bowfell and Langdale and
the rest are, of course, modern names given by a later people no
more than a thousand years ago. But the axsmiths of i860 b.c.

would have their names for the dales and the fells, and their
names went at least as far back in their traditions as the present
names in ours.)

And now, while their mothers grind the flour and prepare
the meat for the substantial evening meal, and their elder
brothers and sisters roam the steep scree slopes collecting rocks of