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And in the midst of that circle was the pool of still, black water, and across that towered the tall menhir from a green bank on which it stood facing me. All round the pool was green grass, bright with the treacherous greenness that tells of deep bog beneath it, and then fair turf, and beyond the turf the rocky scree from the cliffs again. The menhir was full thrice a man's height.
His foot splashed into the ooze of the bank and went down; and with that he lost his footing altogether and fell headlong into the pool, swaying as he went, across the front of the menhir. Now there was a shout and the sound of hurrying footsteps behind me, but it was Howel's voice, and I did not turn.
At Rollright, in Oxfordshire, there is a circle 100 feet in diameter with a tall menhir 50 yards to the north-east.
In Cumberland there are several circles. One of these, 330 feet in diameter with an outstanding menhir, is known as "Long Meg and her Daughters." Another, the Mayborough Circle, is of much the same size, but consists of a tall monolith in the centre of a rampart formed entirely of rather small water-worn stones.
The old prophecy had come to pass, and there was indeed an end. But I saw for a moment into that pit before it was filled, and in it was laid open as it were a great stone chest, where the base of the menhir had been to cover it, and in that were skulls and bones of men, and among them the dull gleam of ancient gold and flint.
Two steps took me to the menhir, and I drew my seax that I might do as he asked me. It was a little thing, and Christian, and I thought that maybe he had come to himself from the madness of which men spoke.
Silbury Hill is itself an artificial conical mound, the largest in England, 170 feet high, on which were originally no less than 650 upright stones, of which only twenty are still standing, surrounded by a trench. In the centre of the circle of stones a single menhir of great height still remains with three others sloped so as to form a kind of crypt.
The diameters of the outer circles of these two pairs are 350 and 325 feet respectively. In the centre of the northern pair was a cover-slab supported by three uprights, and in the centre of the southern a single menhir. All the stones used are sarsens, such as are strewn everywhere over the district.
He led us along the path, which I suppose his own feet and those of Morfed had worn, unless it was old as the menhir itself, and on the way he said suddenly: "Let me ask one thing of you. Has the menhir fallen?" "Ay, with the cross graven on it," I answered; and my words checked a laugh that was on Evan's lips. "I knew it. I heard the crash," the man said. "That is an end therefore."
I thought that maybe he would sing to us the end of Owen, as would Thorgils, but the tongue in which the words were spoken was not the Welsh that I knew. I think now that it was the tongue of the men who reared the menhir, and that which was the mother of the tongue of Howel and Gerent alike.
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