A few further thoughts before Christmas, pursuing the chain of ideas sketched out in my last post. In chapter three, he described sitting on a burial mound on the Wiltshire downs:. Some warrior had been interred there in the antehistoric times. The sun of the summer morning shone on the dome of sward, and the air came softly up from the wheat below, the tips of the grasses swayed as it passed sighing faintly, it ceased, and the bees hummed by to the thyme and heathbells.
I felt at that moment that I was like the spirit of the man whose body was interred in the tumulus; I could understand and feel his existence the same as my own. He was as real to me two thousand years after interment as those I had seen in the body. The abstract personality of the dead seemed as existent as thought.
As my thought could slip back the twenty centuries in a moment to the forest-days when he hurled the spear, or shot with the bow, hunting the deer, and could return again as swiftly to this moment, so his spirit could endure from then till now, and the time was nothing.
To me everything is supernatural…. As I move about in the sunshine I feel in the midst of the supernatural: in the midst of immortal things… Everything around is supernatural; everything so full of unexplained meaning… I stand this moment at the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face with nature, face to face with the supernatural, with myself. It starts one September evening, when Rudolph Reeve is seated on another tumulus:. On its terraced slope Rudolph sat and gazed out, with all the artistic pleasure of a poet or a painter for he was a little of both in the exquisite flush of the dying reflections from the dying sun upon the dying heather.
Why he felt it he knew not; but even as he sat there on the grassy tumulus… he was aware, through an external sense, but by pure internal consciousness, of something or other living and moving within the barrow… Nothing else was astir [but] in spite of sight and sound, he was still deeply thrilled by this strange consciousness as of something living and moving in the barrow underneath; something living and moving- or was it moving and dead?
