When I came to Stonehenge I saw a group of about a score of men
standing among the stones. They asked me with some solemnity if
I was expecting anyone, and when I said No they spoke to me no
more. It was three miles back where I left those strange old men,
but I had not been in the stone circle long when they appeared,
coming with great strides along the road. When they saw them all
the people took off their hats and acted very strangely, and I saw
that they had a goat which they led up then to the old altar stone.
And the two old men came up with their hammer and spear and
began apologizing plaintively for the liberty they had taken in coming
back to that place, and all the people knelt on the grass before them.
And then still kneeling they killed the goat by the altar, and when the
two old men saw this they came up with many excuses and eagerly
sniffed the blood. And at first this made them happy. But soon the
one with the spear began to whimper. "It used to be men," he
lamented. "It used to be men."
And the twenty men began looking uneasily at each other, and the
plaint of the one-eyed man went on in that tearful voice, and all of
a sudden they all looked at me. I do not know who the two old men
were or what any of them were doing, but there are moments when
it is clearly time to go, and I left them there and then. And just as I
got up on to my bicycle I heard the plaintive voice of the one with the
hammer apologizing for the liberty he had taken in coming back to
Stonehenge.
"But after all these years," I heard him crying, "After all these
years...."
And the one with the spear said: "Yes, after three thousand years...."
NATURE AND TIME
Through the streets of Coventry one winter's night strode a
triumphant spirit. Behind him stooping, unkempt, utterly ragged,
wearing the clothes and look that outcasts have, whining, weeping,
reproaching, an ill-used spirit tried to keep pace with him. Continually
she plucked him by the sleeve and cried out to him as she panted
after and he strode resolute on.
It was a bitter night, yet it did not seem to be the cold that she feared,
ill-clad though she was, but the trams and the ugly shops and the glare
of the factories, from which she continually winced as she hobbled on,
and the pavement hurt her feet.
He that strode on in front seemed to care for nothing, it might be hot
or cold, silent or noisy, pavement or open fields, he merely had the
air of striding on.
And she caught up and clutched him by the elbow. I heard her
speak in her unhappy voice, you scarcely heard it for the noise of
the traffic.
"You have forgotten me," she complained to him. "You have forsaken
me here."
She pointed to Coventry with a wide wave of her arm and seemed
to indicate other cities beyond. And he gruffly told her to keep
pace with him and that he did not forsake her. And she went on
with her pitiful lamentation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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