Page 38 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

cleared out the chamber beneath the capstone, and used it for
the first two burials within the community. But last year they had

completed a new burial place, an immense and lofty room with
walls of upright stones and a roof formed of no less than six
large slabs, approached by a stone passageway, and the whole

covered by a mound of turf. They were justly proud of the mag­
nificent new tomb, with the green turf rising above the white

limestone ringstones—proud, and a little afraid; and never a
month passed without a procession to the passage-grave, and of­
ferings and libations and jars of food and drink for the spirits of

the three dead ones who already lay within.
But though they venerated their fathers and grandfathers,

and punctiliously gave them their due of offerings, they gave lit­
tle thought to the men of the olden days who had lived on the
site before. They had even unceremoniously cleared out the old

bones from where they lay thick on the floor of the dolmen
chamber, and dumped them outside to make room for their own
burials. For the signs of earlier villages were common along the

fjords and in the forests, half-overgrown clearings and collapsed
houses with moss-grown timbers. They well knew that a village

has no permanency; at longest every dozen years, when the
millet and barley began to fail, it was necessary to leave the

homestead and seek out a new site for cultivation. And as the
forest reclaimed the abandoned site, so the strength would return
to the exhausted soil, and it might even be possible, within the

lifetime of a man, to return to the overgrown fields and burn them
clear once more, and again raise crops there. For that was the

way one lived, here on the shores of the northern sea.
Though they had been long in the land, these builders of
passage-graves and sowers of the forest clearings, they knew from

the traditions of their people that their ancestors had originally
come from the south. They could tell the tale of the generations

back to the first settlers some five hundred years or so ago—
scarcely further back, after all, than the discovery of America is
behind us—and they maintained intricate family relationships

and family feuds with the people of the lands from which their
fathers had come even as far as the Hungarian plains. Adven-