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He insisted on conducting Billy and me through the plantations of maize and sugar-cane, directed our attention to the orchards of fruit-trees, and finally led us to the cliffs, which I now saw were honeycombed with rock-dwellings, and introduced us to his own particular mansion, which was a cave of some twelve feet wide by twenty feet deep, very stuffy and malodorous.
Thoroton, in his history of Nottinghamshire, 1797, gives an illustration of rock-dwellings at Sneynton, adjoining Nottingham, but they have recently been cleared away for railway extension. The sanitary authorities have done their best to sweep the tenants out of the Nottingham cave habitations, but in Staffordshire at Kinver there are still troglodytes.
I tried to imagine what sort of existence these people led. In the old days the rock-dwellings among the cactus served the gipsies for winter quarters only, and when the spring came they set off, scouring the country for something to earn or steal; but that is long ago.
Graphic representations made for the encouragement of fertility as on the walls of Bushmen's rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of Altamira became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of plants or of the weather or the stars, carried on by tribal medicine-men for purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied some of the material of Science; and humanity emerged by faltering and hesitating steps on the borderland of those finer perceptions and reasonings which are supposed to be characteristic of Civilization.
There is a range of rock-dwellings in connection with it, some inhabited and some abandoned. The Grotte des Vierges is entered by steps descending into the principal chamber that is lighted by a window and is furnished with a fireplace. At one of the angles is a circular pit, six feet deep, with a groove at top for the reception of a cover. This was a silo for grain.
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