Beginnings英国起源(5)

So Skara Brae was not just an isolated settlement of fishers and farmers.

Its people must have belonged to some larger society.

One sophisticated enough to mobilise the army of toilers and craftsmen needed.

Not just to make these monuments, but to stand them on end.

And they were just as concerned about housing for dead as the living.

The mausoleum at Maes Howe, a couple of miles from Skara Brae, seems no more than a swelling on the grassy landscape.

But this is, as it were, a British pyramid and in keeping with our taste for understatement.

It reserves all its impact for the interior.

Imagine them open once more.

A detail from a village given the job of pulling back the stone seals, lugging the body through the low opening in the earth.

Up 36 feet of narrow, tight-fitting passageway, lit only once a year by the rays of the winter solstice.

A death canal, constriction, smelling of the underworld.

Finally the passageway opens up to this stupendous, high-vaulted masonry chamber.

Some of these tombs would have been elaborately decorated with carvings in the form of circles or spirals, like waves or the breeze-pushed clouds.

Others would have had neat little stone stores or cubicles where the bodies would be laid out on shelves.