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,