The pit was ten feet deep or so, and it was plain that out of it had come what made the mound, though one could not see how. When I looked in I saw that the ground had given way over the roof of a passage hewn in the soft chalk, and that the opening of it must have fallen in long ago. The twisted stems of the sparse heather on the mound and all around it told of years, if not of long ages, that had passed undisturbed.
"There is the trolls' house," said Erling, shrinking back somewhat.
The level sunlight showed me walls of dull gray chalk, with the marks of the pick on them still. There was a layer of black and white flints bedded in either wall, halfway up, and on the floor were piled stones chosen from it carefully. I wondered who had handled them, and when. Erling moved a little aside, and a shaft of sunlight darted down the passage and reached its end, and showed me those who had wrought here.
Two white skeletons sat against the wall, with a pile of flints between them. There was a lamp hewn from chalk on the top of that, and the stain of its smoky flame was on the wall behind it. One man had a pick made of the brow tine of an antler, greater than any which the red deer carry nowadays, across his knees, and another like pick lay by the bones of the other skeleton. That one had a broken thigh, and he seemed to bend over it in pain.
"Holy saints," said Werbode, in a whisper, "they were buried alive!"
So they must have been; but who shall know when? They had delved in the chalk for the flints they needed for their weapons, and their mine had fallen in at the mouth, and they could not escape. The stones had, doubtless, broken the leg of that one in falling. But by the token of the deer-horn pick I take it that it was ages ago when this happened, maybe before the days of the Welshmen whom we found here. Yet even then, as the red sun lit up the place of their death, we could see that the marks of their chalky hands bided on the handles of their picks, fresh as if made yesterday.
"Come away," said Erling. "I like it not. This is over troll-like for me."
I do not think that either of us was sorry to leave that sight. We went one on either side of Werbode, with our arms across the crupper of his horse, and hastened after the thane and his charge, who were half a mile away by this time, waiting for us. But we never heard any elvish arrow whistling after us, or saw any more of the uncouth folk.
I told him as we went on of the pit we had seen, and how Werbode thought it was a trap. Whereon the housecarl laughed a little, and said that it was but an ancient flint working. The men who had fallen on the party were the descendants of those who had made it. The flints had been worked here from time untold even till now, and those who worked them today had all the craft of their forebears.
"Why, then, they went into their workings when they fled from us," I said.