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Updated: August 11, 2024
Now he was afraid, even in the bright sunlight, and owned it. But the first shock had passed from me, and I looked for our horses. They had gone. I think that the fall of the menhir scared them, for they were yet tied where Evan left them, just before that. "Howel, the horses have broken loose and gone," I cried.
Then he turned a little from me, and looked at the shadow which had passed altogether from the altar stone now, and half to himself he said: "I had thought that this menhir had fallen when this came to pass. But maybe the old prophecy meant that not until it fell we must cease our rites. But that was not how we read the words of old time. If we read them wrong, what else have we mistaken?"
The antiquary, because he has his own prejudices, perceives an abyss between the act of the Cockney tourist of to-day who carves his name upon an old tower or a menhir, and that of a man who five centuries ago, for no better reason than the other, left upon a guard-room wall a similar record of his passage.
Another well-known circle in Cornwall is called the Stripple Stones: the circle stands on a platform of earth surrounded by a ditch, outside which is a rampart. In the centre is a menhir 12 feet in height.
Castles and manor-houses have vanished from the moorland confines like the cloudy palaces of a dream; the habitations of the mining folk shall not be seen to-day, and their handiwork quickly returns to primitive waste; fern and furze hide the robbed cairn and bury the shattered cross; flood and lightning and tempest roam over the darkness of a region sacred to them, and man stretches his hand for what Nature touches not; but the menhir yet stands erect, the "sacred" circles are circles still, and these, with like records of a dim past, present to thinking travellers the crown and first glory of the Moor.
No one has ever yet produced a written passage or any ancient testimony to prove the existence of the name before Rabelais. To place such a tradition on a sure basis, positive traces must be forthcoming; and they cannot be adduced even for the most celebrated of these monuments, since he mentions himself the great menhir near Poitiers, which he christened by the name of Passelourdin.
Menhir is derived from the Breton men, a stone, and hir, long; similarly dolmen is from dol, a table, and men, a stone. Some archæologists also apply the word dolmen to rectangular chambers roofed with more than one slab. We have carefully avoided this practice, always classing such chambers as corridor-tombs of an elementary type.
Lo! the sun comes, and time passes swiftly." The sun did indeed shine out now as some cloud passed, and I saw that its rays came slanting through the gap in the cliffs across the pool, passing the menhir without lighting on it, but falling now on the flat rock that was behind it, though not fully yet. Half thereof was still in the shadow thrown by the hills.
And then on the next night, soon after I first slept, I woke trembling with the most strange dream of all. I think that the light had hardly gone from the west, but the moon had not yet risen. I dreamed that I stood at the end of a narrow valley, whose sides were of tall cliffs of rough grey stone, and in the depth of the valley I saw a great menhir standing on the farther side of a black pool.
I have seen pool and menhir, and the cliffs that hem them, even as the princess saw them. And I woke with the voice of Owen in my ears." "Dreams, dreams!" the old king said. "Go to, you do but tell me these trifles to please me, and as if to give me hope that in such an unheard-of place we shall find him whom we have lost. Say no more, but go your ways on the morrow and search.
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