Word: shrine
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...rate, says Atkinson, they must have dragged and floated those 82 tones, weighing up to seven tons, all the way from Wales (about 200 miles). Wessex Aristocrats. Stonehenge II lasted for some 150 years. Then a third people moved in to take over the ancient shrine. They decided that the bluestones were not big enough, so they quarried enormous blocks of sandstone in the Marlborough Downs, 25 miles from Stonehenge. Some of these weigh 42 tons, and they were dropped by sledge. Although estimates that this job took more than 1,000 men working for ten years...
...Savage Shrine. Stonehenge was a center of a savage religion, and like the many cathedrals of medieval Europe, it took centuries to build. The first shrine, says Atkinson, was built about 1800 B.C. It was chiefly a circle of 56 "ritual pits," some of them containing cremated human remains, perhaps of ritual victims. A single stone stood upright at the circle's entrance, and near it was a wooden structure whose traces still remain...
...unusual number of neolithic tombs (Long Barrows) concentrated around it. But about 1650 B.C., a new tribe of barbarians came to Salisbury Plain. They were the Beaker People (socalled because of their characteristic pottery) and although they may have brought their own religion, they improved the Stonehenge shrine instead of destroying it. Their contribution was 82 "blue-stones," arranged in a double circle with stones flanking an axis that points toward the midsummer sunrise. This was a step forward in religious technology; it showed that the Beaker People had tied their ritual to the movements...
...foreign commerce of the "Wessex aristocrats" is probably the reason for sophistication of the shrine they built at Stonehenge. The heavy stone lintels are not merely placed on top of the uprights. They are laboriously fitted The lintels are curved to fit the circles in which they lie, and their sides are in clined to counteract the foreshortening effect of perspective...
Relentless in his determination to catch the outlaw, Dixit set a specially trained company of Gurkha police combing the jungle for his quarry. As an added precaution, he himself climbed to a mountain shrine in Amarnath to ask help of the god Siva. One day last week, as Man Singh sat resting under a banyan tree near the village of Kakekapura, Siva answered the prayer. A telephone rang in the New Delhi residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, and over it a jubilant voice crowed to India's Prime Minister: "Panditji, this is Home Minister Dixit. We have just killed...