who would take the trouble
to dig up the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would
care what had become of their pitiful little souls--their immortal part.

Chapter Seven: Roman Calleva

An afternoon in the late November of 1903. Frost, gales, and abundant
rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their yellow leaves. But
the rain is over now, the sky once more a pure lucid blue above me--all
around me, in fact, since I am standing high on the top of the ancient
stupendous earthwork, grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly
and thorn and hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar. It is
marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I only hear
the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall, and the robin, for one
spied me here and has come to keep me company. At intervals he spurts
out his brilliant little fountain of sound; and that sudden bright
melody and the bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like
one thing. Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed among
trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet bracken. Not that
I am expecting to get a glimpse of the badger who has his hermitage in
this solitary place, but I am on forbidden ground, in the heart of a
sacred pheasant preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily. Hard
by, almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on which I
stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva--the Silchester which
the antiquarians have been occupied in uncovering these dozen years
or longer. The stone walls, too, like the more ancient earthwork, are
overgrown with trees and brambles and ivy. The trees have grown upon the
wall, sending roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling
cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls but it
brings down huge masses of masonry with it. This slow levelling process
has been going on for centuries, and it was doubtless in this way that
the buildings within the walls were pulled down long ages ago. Then the
action of the earth-worms began, and floors and foundations, with fallen
stones and tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once
a city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn. Finally the wood
was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field--so far as we know,
the ground has been cultivated since the days of King John. But the
entire history of this green walled space before me--less tha