This might be expected to spoil the effect of grandeur which Avebury should give; but on that particular night a village fair happened to be in progress. Although it was true that houses and people did take from Avebury that peculiar mystery which Stonehenge gains from its loneliness on the downs, yet I now saw that during the centuries, Avebury had gathered a new romantic character. The temple and the cottages possessed a unity, for the houses have not only grown up among the stones, they are of the stones. The vandalism which long ago hewed up the megaliths and made from them little houses for farm labourers to dwell in with their families, has succeeded in blending the one with the other. The old stones of Avebury are humanized as Stonehenge will never be.
And the fair that night brought out this aspect of the place. It looked right. The grand megaliths and the humble cottages alike were partly obscured by the failing light and the falling rain, but both were fitfully lit by flares and torches from booths and shows. Some rather primitive swing-boats flew in and out of this dim circle of light: cocoanuts rolled hairily from the sticks upon which they had been planted: bottles were shivered by gun-shots and tinkled as they fell to the ground. And all the time, the little casual crowd of villagers strayed with true Wiltshire indifference from one sight to another. Those great stones, the legacy of architects of an unknown race, had succeeded in adapting themselves completely to the village life of another day. I stood on the bank for a short time watching the scene; and then I decided that too much rain was falling down the back of my neck, so I got into the car and drove away.
I drove away for nine years, for that time passed before I visited Avebury again. This time I went there as a sightseer with a friend, and we walked round the embankment and looked at the village and finally went to get some tea at the inn. While we sat there, waiting for the kettle to boil, my friend took up a guide book which was lying on the table, and suddenly she exclaimed:
‘Listen. What does this mean? You saw a ghost Fair when you were here before.’
Then she read to me that a fair had formerly been held every year at Avebury, but that it had been abolished in 1850.
So long had passed since the night I saw the fair, and so absolutely normal had it then appeared to me, that now I found great difficulty in answering the questions which at once occurred to my mind. How, for instance, had the people been dressed? As far as I could remember, very much as country people still did dress at the time I was seeing them. An impression remained of browns and other dark, rather dull colours—of clothes which toned with the rainy night. Then again, had I heard the noise of the fair or had I only seen it? I thought I remembered voices and music and rifle shots and the clicking of balls against cocoanuts, but how far away from me had those sounds seemed to be? I supposed that they must have sounded quite normally near, or I should have felt that I was seeing something uncanny. This I certainly had not felt at the time.
But now there seemed to be no doubt that in October 1916, I had watched a scene which must have taken place at least sixty-six years earlier.
The following year I was again at Avebury, this time as a member of a learned society which was studying the monument, for now I wanted to find out as much about it as possible. Sitting there on the bank, in a group of elderly savants, I told them my story of the fair. Their manners were too good to betray their incredulity, but one of them asked:
‘By which way did you approach Avebury that night?’
‘Not the way we came to-day. I came through the avenue of megaliths.’
‘That had disappeared before the year 1800.’
So not only the fair but the whole of my experience that night from the time I left the village of Beckhampton a mile away, had taken me back to some time in the eighteenth century. I must have stepped back in time, as did Miss Moberly and her friend at Trianon, who in 1901 walked on paths, crossed bridges, and saw cascades, which had ceased to exist a hundred years earlier.
Mr. J. W. Dunne, the author of An Experiment with Time, in writing of this Trianon experience, says that, according to his theory of serialism, ‘all our individual minds are merely aspects of a universal common-to-all mind, which mind has for its four-dimensional outlook all the individual outlooks’.
This is what I was trying to suggest in what I wrote above about the character of Salisbury Plain. Here, if anywhere, one feels as if one had been taken up into that ‘ universal common-to-all mind’. It is not a question of ‘seeing ghosts’ or of ‘having visions’: it is that sometimes, under the influence of that great spirit that seems ever brooding over the Plain, one’s own little outlook is lost, and one is incorporated into something older and bigger and wiser than oneself. One knows what the past was like.
Of course I at once wanted to know whether or not that avenue ever did exist. Traditionally, as I have said, Avebury was originally approached by more than one avenue; but of the Beckhampton one by which I must have come that evening, there exists to-day no trace.
It was therefore with immense interest that I heard a year or two ago that the avenue was being excavated, that many of the megaliths had been
