Читать книгу The City of the Sacred Well онлайн

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And the story of man’s rise and fall, in the passing of the ages, usually is buried in the earth, to be laid bare to our eyes if we have but the patience to find and the ability to understand. Just as a good woodsman can read from a scratch on a tree or a faint footprint on the ground things not obvious to the untrained observer, our men of science have developed remarkable expertness in divining the history of bygone eras from the scanty traces that remain. From a skull, centuries buried in a cave, they reconstruct the Neanderthal man. The fragments of an earthen pot tell them the degree of culture and the period of him who once supped from the vessel.

Wherever there are caves there is the likelihood of uncovering vestiges of aboriginal life, for primitive men everywhere used caverns, either as temporary shelters or as permanent abodes. Beneath the cave floor may be the evidence of many generations of men—the relics buried in layers one upon another as the discarded and broken implements of one generation were trampled underfoot and submerged under the charred embers and rubbish of the succeeding one.