And this
wall of the South Downs, too, marked but another frontier of the same
great government; beyond it lay the horizons unknown, and it barred
out the sea.
But how much older than Rome are the South Downs! Doubtless before the
foundation of Rome, e'er Troy was besieged, these hills stood up
against the south and served us as a habitation and a home. Nor indeed
have we failed to leave signs of our life there so many thousand years
ago, so that to-day a man wandering over that great uplifted plateau
which slopes so gradually towards the sea, though he seem to be
utterly alone, as far as possible from the ways and the habitations of
men, immersed in an immemorial silence, in truth passes only from
forgotten city to forgotten city, amid the strongholds and the burial
places of a civilisation so old that it is only the earth itself which
retains any record or memory of it. Here were our cities when we
feared the beast, before we had knowledge of bronze or iron, when our
tool and our weapon was the flint.
The man, our ancestor, who chipped and prepared the flints for our use
at Cissbury for instance, doubtless looked out upon a landscape
different from that we see to-day and yet essentially the same after all.
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