All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel is
very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest, allied to
it, which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more
fascinating and more full of meaning. This interest is the interest in
such things as lie behind recorded history, and have survived into our
own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid
epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing
the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into
this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the
power to construct and to do--underneath all that is the foundation on
which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that stem
is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more vital
than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents.
Recorded history for this island and for Northern France and for the
Rhine Valley is a matter of two thousand years; for the Western
Mediterranean of three; but the things of which I speak are to be
reckoned in tens of thousands of years. Their interest does not lie only
nor even chiefly in things that have disappeared. It is indeed a great
pleasure to rummage in the earth and find polished stones wrought by men
who came so many centuries before us, and of whose blood we certainly
are; and it is a great pleasure to find, or to guess that we find, under
Canterbury the piles of a lake or marsh dwelling, proving that
Canterbury has been there from all time; and that the apparently
defenceless Valley City was once chosen as an impregnable site, when the
water-meadows of the Stour were impassable as marsh, or with difficulty
passable as a shallow lagoon.
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