• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3934 0

strong, rugged features, long black hair which he swept back, and a black beard which he kept meticulously trimmed and singed. His eyes, black as jet, could be hard when he was driving a bargain, but could also become gentle and luminous, especially when he sang, which he did in a fine, tuneful bass; and it was partly for this reason that he was well known from the trading post to the port to be popular with the women. Tark was an expert trader, with six boats and men of his own working under him. He was everywhere, even crossing the sea sometimes in search of slaves or special items that he knew would please Krona or the priests. Above all, he was wily in his dealing with the priests, always making himself useful to them, while at the same time seeing to it that each transaction was to his benefit. He liked the little mason, whom he found slightly absurd, admired his craftsmanship and had formed a kind of friendship with him, often letting him have small items from his river-trading which the mason would never have been clever enough to bargain for himself.

Nooma was sure that he would know how to organise the provisioning and quartering of his men, and he was right.

“You have a month to prepare,” the priests told the mason. “At the next new moon, work must begin.”

In the days that followed, Nooma found that his needs were more than supplied. The priests moved from house to house, picking young men whenever they were needed. Before the work was done, over a third of the adult male population would be engaged on the task at any one time. Under Tark’s direction, grain stores were built near the site from which the sarsens would be brought, and the work of felling trees, which would be used as rollers over which the huge stones could be moved, was begun.

By the end of the month, despite the huge size of the task before him, Nooma felt the first dawning of a new confidence. Encouraged by Tark, who was delighted by such an opportunity to make himself useful to the priests, he began to go about his great work with a new optimism and before the end of the month confided to the trader: “Perhaps, after all, it can be done.”

While the preparations were in hand, he also set his mind to the technical problems presented by the stones themselves: how were they to be handled, and above all, how were such cumbersome objects to be fitted together in so precise a design?

It was in this that Nooma showed a practical genius which amply justified the choice that the priests had made in putting the work under his hands.

For when he came to report to the priests at the end of the month, the little mason was brimming with suppressed excitement.

As he outlined his plans, jabbing the air with his stubby little fingers, he announced:

“We must cut the stones into their final shape before we move them.”

The priests were surprised. It had been assumed that the rough hewn rocks would be brought to the henge before they were shaped. But Nooma shook his head.

“First,” he explained, “it is foolish to move the sarsens before they are almost shaped, because they will be heavier. And second, if we cut and dress the stones at the henge, the mess will be enormous: thousands of stone chippings to carry away.”

“Then you mean to shape every stone of the temple a day’s journey away, carry the finished stones to the sacred ground and assemble them there?” One of the priests asked in astonishment.

He nodded calmly. “Why not?”

Next he produced his own drawings.

To produce the identically curved lintels he proposed to make a wooden block, along which each stone could be cut, and in order to fix them in place he had devised an ingenious solution.

“See,” he explained, “at the top of each upright we can make two tenons – these bumps – and on the underside of each lintel two matching sockets for the tenons to fit into.”

He pointed them out to the priests.

“They will be fitted into each other just as we do blocks of wood,” he explained. “And then,” he continued, “I can make tongue and groove joints at the end of the lintels so that each one slots into the