What could have been simpler than the building methods of the Iberians? We see them at Stonehenge, which dates from about the year 1680 B.C., according to the astronomical calculations of Sir Norman Lockyer and the late Mr. F. C. Penrose.[40] Here we have the primitive circle of large stones, and the rugged trilithon (two rude uprights, or menhirs, connected by a long table slab or lintel). There is a feeling for massive construction, but it is barbaric. The clapper bridges over Dartmoor rivers belong to this elementary craftsmanship. Each is a cromlech repeated in several spans over water, no matter when it was built (p. 100). Among the ancient Egyptians there were kindred bridges; and the Chinese have managed to preserve in a formidable handicraft an Iberian fondness for the trilithon. Mr. O. M. Jackson tells me that many slab-bridges in Sichuan have lintels about twenty feet in length; they are decorated by sculptors with a dragon’s head and tail at the junction of two lintels and a stone pier. Every dragon’s head looks upstream, and the tail curls out on the downstream side; so the slabs appear to rest for security on the back of a guardian dragon. There is a Chinese bridge of lintel-slabs, concerning which very different descriptions have been written, but even the most moderate account makes it more than four and a half times longer than the Pont Saint-Esprit (p. 293). Gauthey writes about it as follows:-- “At Loyang, in the Province of Fo-Kien, on an arm of the sea, there is a bridge with three hundred spans; its construction went on for eighteen years and employed twenty-five thousand workmen. Technically it belongs to the same class as the bridges of ancient Babylon, which are said to have been made with long and flat stones laid from pier to pier. If Loyang Bridge be 8800 metres in length, as some writers affirm, then its piers will be 4 metres 87 in thickness, and its spans in width will measure 24.36 metres. The footway is 22.74 metres. The long slabs are 5 metres thick and 3 metres wide. As for the piers, they are 23 metres in height, and bear marble lions carved from blocks 7 metres long.” Gauthey gives a drawing of this bridge, and his measurements are taken from the Atlas of Martimmart. They have an air of great exaggeration. As Gauthey remarks, “It is difficult to believe that the tabular stones are as large as they are presumed to be: their bulk is more than threefold greater than that of the obelisk at Rome in the Place de Saint-Pierre. Besides, M. Pingeron speaks of them as being fourteen metres long by a metre and a half in thickness and in width, so he diminishes by a full half the length of Loyang Bridge. Even with this reduction it is a wonderful achievement, more than four and a half times longer than the Pont du Saint-Esprit.”[41]