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Updated: May 13, 2025
The southern cromlech province, beginning at the Strait of Gibraltar, extends eastward along the African coast past Algiers to the headland of Tunis, where Carthage stood, at a date far later than the age of cromlechs.
We are in presence of archaic purposes recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in the unknown. There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set upright in the earth. They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on the velvet grass. There are cromlechs set alone a single huge boulder borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight.
It is therefore very deplorable to discover that so much has been destroyed, obliterated, and forgotten. We have still some left. Examples are still to be seen of megalithic structures, barrows, cromlechs, camps, earthen or walled castles, hut-circles, and other remains of the prehistoric inhabitants of these islands.
They are to be found in great numbers all along the roads or paths which lead to the clan cromlechs. These stones, unlike the mawbynna, have no names. The upright stones are called maw-shynrang, or male stones, and the flat table-stones maw-kynthei, or female stones.
The third remarkable feature of Khasi usage is the custom, which prevails to this day, of setting up great memorials of rough stone, of the same style and character as the menhirs and cromlechs which are found in Western Europe, Northern Africa, and Western Asia.
At dinner the talk diverged from sport to the ancient tin-works, stone circles, camps and cromlechs on the tors about us, and from there to touch speculatively on the darker side of the old religions: hence at length the doctor's story, which he told over the pipes and whisky, leaning his arms upon the table and gazing at it rather than at us, as though drawing his memories out of depths below its polished surface.
These stone cromlechs contain the bones of the dead, and the menhirs and table-stones are intimately connected with them, inasmuch as memorial stones to deceased ancestors are erected when the ceremony of depositing bones in the cineraria has been completed. The cineraria are built of blocks of stone, sometimes on stone platforms, and sometimes resting on the ground.
They are by popular tradition connected with the aboriginal builders of the rude stone monuments of the district, though, according to the above-mentioned authority, without any claim to such distinction. They, however, worship at these cromlechs from time to time, and are associated with them in another interesting manner.
These folks of Atlantis "saw no dreams," but they studied astronomy and navigation; their priests may well have been those Druids whose temple-structures, the senams and cromlechs, have wandered from the Tripolitan frontier as far as the chilly coasts of Brittany, and Salisbury Plain, and Ultima Thule.
Broken are the circles and the cromlechs of the ancient Druids; fallen upon the summits of the hills, and covered with the centuries' moss are the sacred cairns. The divine fires of Persia and of the Aztecs have died out in the ashes of the past, and there is none to rekindle, and none to feed the holy flames.
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