declared that they were made by stones falling from heaven. This,
of course, suggested meteorites to my mind. I submitted the idea
to Bickley, who, in one of his rare intervals of leisure, came
with me to make an examination.

"If they were meteorites," he said, "of which a shower struck
the earth in some past geological age, all life must have been
destroyed by them and their remains ought to exist at the bottom
of the holes. To me they look more like the effect of high
explosives, but that, of course, is impossible, though I don't
know what else could have caused such craters."

Then he went back to his work, for nothing that had to do with
antiquity interested Bickley very much. The present and its
problems were enough for him, he would say, who neither had lived
in the past nor expected to have any share in the future.

As I remained curious I made an opportunity to scramble to the
bottom of one of these craters, taking with me some of the
natives with their wooden tools. Here I found a good deal of soil
either washed down from the surface or resulting from the
decomposition of the rock, though oddly enough in it nothing
grew. I directed them to dig. After a while to my astonishment
there appeared a corner of a great worked stone quite unlike that
of the crater, indeed it seemed to me to be a marble. Further
examination showed that this block was most beautifully carved in
bas-relief, apparently with a design of leaves and flowers. In
the disturbed soil also I picked up a life-sized marble hand of a
woman exquisitely finished and apparently broken from a statue
that might have been the work of one of the great Greek