Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/130

118 said Sir Richmond. “Wood and fibre.” He declared that these people had their tools of wood, their homes of wood, their gods and perhaps their records of wood. “A peat bog here, even a few feet of clay, might have pickled some precious memoranda.... No such luck....” Now in Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron age—half way to our own times—quite beautifully pickled.

Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir Richmond nor the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the riddle why the ditch was inside and not outside the great wall.

“And what was our Mind like in those days?” said Sir Richmond. “That, I suppose, is what interests you. A vivid childish mind, I guess, with not a suspicion as yet that it was Man ruling his Planet or anything of that sort.”

The doctor pursed his lips. “None,” he delivered judicially. “If one were able to recall one’s childhood—at the age of about twelve or thirteen—when the artistic impulse so often goes into abeyance and one begins to think in a troubled, monstrous way about God and Hell, one might get something like the mind of this place.”

“Thirteen. You put them at that—already?... These people, you think, were religious?”

“Intensely. In that personal way that gives death a nightmare terror. And as for the fading of the artistic impulse, they’ve left not a trace of