Graves of the Hindimini
been a place of some consideration. Below the slipshod late
work, the remains of a more massive and primitive style
appeared. As in the Larti, boulders as big as a man, or nearly
so, had been used for the ground work of the houses, and
showed, by their alignment, the old streets running horizon-
tally above the valley bottom. Here, in a promising spot
that a druid might have chosen for his burial place, under an
oak tree with low branches, where three boulders, arranged
like a tripod, marked the tomb, we started operations. We
were embarrassed by too much help, having eleven young men
besides various advisers and onlookers, and I hastened to look
round for more tombs to distribute their energy. But even
so we were disappointed.
After digging down two feet or so, we came upon the hori-
zontal boulders that cover in a grave. We dug carefully
until all was laid bare, then lifted the lid; with sticks and
fingers, so that no treasure might escape nor its position be
confused, we laid bare the skeleton, stretched out exactly like
those of the Larti, with head on one side and feet south-east,
but nothing further was there. A few shards of unglazed
pottery; a fragment of mortar that can obviously not have
belonged to prehistoric man; and nothing else between the
carefully built sides of the narrow resting-place. No graves
had ever been excavated, no bronzes had ever been found
here. The bronzes, I was becoming more and more con-
vinced, belonged to people who followed the rivers and ever
clung to the neighbourhood of waterways. If these valleys
were indeed the refuge of the country's first inhabitants, as is
likely enough, they probably remained in their rough and
primitive condition long after the river-lands were civilized.
The graves we discovered might have been early Moslem.
Our men had fears about it, owing to their lying in an
orthodox direction.