| [00:00.693] |
So Skara Brae was not just an isolated settlement of fishers and farmers. |
| [00:06.000] |
Its people must have belonged to some larger society. |
| [00:09.363] |
One sophisticated enough to mobilise the army of toilers and craftsmen needed. |
| [00:15.069] |
Not just to make these monuments, but to stand them on end. |
| [00:20.052] |
And they were just as concerned about housing for dead as the living. |
| [00:26.291] |
The mausoleum at Maes Howe, a couple of miles from Skara Brae, seems no more than a swelling on the grassy landscape. |
| [00:34.356] |
But this is, as it were, a British pyramid and in keeping with our taste for understatement. |
| [00:41.041] |
It reserves all its impact for the interior. |
| [00:47.551] |
Imagine them open once more. |
| [00:49.598] |
A detail from a village given the job of pulling back the stone seals, lugging the body through the low opening in the earth. |
| [00:58.051] |
Up 36 feet of narrow, tight-fitting passageway, lit only once a year by the rays of the winter solstice. |
| [01:07.631] |
A death canal, constriction, smelling of the underworld. |
| [01:28.131] |
Finally the passageway opens up to this stupendous, high-vaulted masonry chamber. |
| [01:35.443] |
Some of these tombs would have been elaborately decorated with carvings in the form of circles or spirals, like waves or the breeze-pushed clouds. |
| [01:45.090] |
Others would have had neat little stone stores or cubicles where the bodies would be laid out on shelves. |
