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It would, perhaps, be prudent to find Nicholas first of all. But where was Nicholas? where was anybody? The scattered, half-buried huts were more like earth-mounds, snow-encrusted, some with drift-logs propped against the front face looking riverwards.
Upon this continent the Indian found the evidences in abundance of a preceding people, the monuments of whose existence he disregards, but which, in the earth-mounds rising up over all the land, arrest the white man's attention and wonder.
Soldiers were seriously wounded there on that very day, for we saw them being carried therefrom on stretchers towards the motor-ambulance and the hospital. After more walking of a very circuitous nature, I noticed a few bricks in the monotonous expanse of dwarf earth-mounds made by shells. "Hello!" I said. "Was there a cottage here?" No!
In this, however, he was disappointed, at least in a great measure; for the persons buried in the churchyard were probably, for the most part, of a humble rank in life, such as were not so ambitious as to desire a monument of any kind, but were content to let their low earth-mounds subside into the level, where their memory had waxed so faint that none among the survivors could point out the spot, or cared any longer about knowing it; while in other cases, where a monument of red freestone, or even of hewn granite, had been erected, the English climate had forthwith set to work to gnaw away the inscriptions; so that in fifty years in a time that would have left an American tombstone as fresh as if just cut it was quite impossible to make out the record.
But, if you go thither in melancholy mood, if you go with a ruin in your heart, or with a vacant site there, where once stood the airy fabric of happiness, now vanished, all the ponderous gloom of the Roman Past will pile itself upon that spot, and crush you down as with the heaped-up marble and granite, the earth-mounds, and multitudinous bricks of its material decay.
In the neolithic period interment became more common and more carefully performed, and the progress of this period is marked by many remains of man, which in later times were buried in elaborately constructed stone sepulchres, sometimes massive in materials and covered by great earth-mounds.
Higher up the hill is the museum, in the style of a Grecian temple circular, and surrounded with columns. The summit of the mountain ends in a fine group of rocks, between which stand some obelisks and monuments, which belong to the old burial-place. The country round is a steppe, covered with artificial earth-mounds, which make the graves of a very remote period.
Nevertheless, looking round upon those grim earth-mounds and embrasures, he could not but give the men who put them there credit for supposing that they might be wanted. Ah! but that might be only one of the direful necessities of the decaying civilisation of the old world. What a contrast to the unarmed and peaceful prosperity of his own country!
The peoples who reared the great earth-mounds of the Middle West, those who carved the curious sculptures of Central America, those who built the cave-dwellings of Arizona, those who piled stone upon stone in the quaint pueblos of New Mexico, those who drove Ponce de Leon away from the shores of Florida, and those who greeted the Pilgrims with, "Welcome, Englishmen!" all these, beyond a doubt, were of one widely varying race.
Babylon, or rather the earth-mounds which are now called Babylon, had very little to do with it." "Don't you want to tell me about it?" demanded Tilliers abruptly. "Not just yet" answered Alwyn, with good-humored frankness, "Not to-night, at any rate! But I WILL tell you, never fear!
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