Then on to Silchester, its furzy common and scattered village
and the vast ruinous walls, overgrown with ivy, bramble, and
thorn, of ancient Roman Calleva. Inside the walls, at one
spot, a dozen men were still at work in the fading light; they
were just finishing--shovelling earth in to obliterate all
that had been opened out during the year. The old flint
foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches
and corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the
winter room with its wide beautiful floor--red and black and
white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist
and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and
beast and bird--all to be covered up with earth so that the
plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and
ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead
city for so many centuries. The very earth within those walls
had a reddish cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red
tile and tessera mixed with it. Larks and finches were busily
searching for seeds in the reddish-brown soil. They would
soon be gone to their roosting-places and the tired men to
their cottages, and the white owl coming from his hiding-place
in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he has
had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into
silence so long ago.
Chapter Ten: The Last of His Name
I came by chance to the village--Norton, we will call it, just
to call it something, but the county in which it is situated
need not be named.
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