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Dr. Schund, what is under Stonehenge?
You are the Neolithic contractor who submitted the 2800 BC low bid for a thing called Stonehenge to be constructed on Salisbury Plain in southern England. This 1700-year public works project (presumably at taxpayer expense) embodies quarrying, conveying 135 miles from the Preseli Mountains in southwest Wales, and erecting 80 bluestones at 4 tons each. There will be a ring of 30 uprights capped with lintels forming a circle around a horseshoe of 5 trilithons (post and lintel triplets). Almost before the ink is dry on the deerskin contract things escalate into an additional outer ring of 30 upright sarsens each 10 feet tall and weighing 26 tons apiece. They will be capped with 30 lintels at six tons each, vertically secured by mortise and tenon joints and horizontally secured by tongue and groove joints. They will be hauled from Marlsborough Downs 20 miles distant. (Was it a military contract? One sarsen weighs 56 tons, stands 20 feet high and has an 8-foot deep root.) Seventeen centuries after the first mid-morning break mandated by union rules, you set up tourist booths and start paying off the bonds.
Wouldn't you kinda sorta hafta really be tempted to put something unusual in the holes before sliding in the biggest slabs? Call it a personal statement to the far unforeseen future (or homespun anticipating Jimmy Hoffa). Modern builders do it all the time - cornerstones. The Masons among you would have it no other way.
Flip a coin to conjecture Stonehenge was assembled during repeated visits by teenage space aliens intent on impressing some planetary graffiti. Post-Modernist teenage space aliens, rather than making a crass statement with 135-million carat single crystal diamond slabs, would decide to go native with "chiseled" stone. The astronomic mathematical accuracies of individual stone placement and group interrelationships hint at field trips by sophomore classes on planetary exploration. This is all the more reason to uproot every upright to see what is written on their bottoms. It is inconceivable that the temptation to bequeath a "Gotcha!" would have not seduced at least one joker in the crowd.
Dr. Schund, heir to every Foggy Bottom iniquity and privy to every Washington privy, has called in owed mortal favors that he might once again delve into the most tenebrous of blackest Top Secret/Lotus Eater files. Surreptitious Federal bureaucracies mining untold wealth from the public exchequer under the presumed impenetrable cloak of National Security have resourcefully prepared for a covert action at Stonehenge. Inspired by the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front, the Berlin Wall, the river of drugs flowing north from Mexico, and a recently deposed Alberto Fujimori's subterranean anti-liberation terrorist "hurrah!" in Chile... the stage has been set. Post-incursion analytical teams have been intensively funded and trained under the guise of examining a putative "Martian meteorite."
I bid you travel to the nearest simulacrum of extraterrestrial desolation short of Sudbury, Canada - rural Texas. Locate Farm- to-Market Road 1340. Fifteen miles west of Kerrville, TX there is an exact full-scale concrete duplication of Stonehenge in its pre-English Socialism glory days, Stonehenge II. Is that not bizarre?
One's first impression of the training ground is that Stonehenge is always photographed from a low angle and without anybody in the frame to provide a sense of proportion. Stonehenge is mostly not all that big, certainly not when compared to its contemporary Egyptian pyramids or modern day strip malls. Granite runs about 157 lbs/cubic foot, sandstone about 140 lbs/cubic foot, bluestone (basalt) about 170 lbs/cubic foot. The lintels, posts, sarsens, and whatnot may have been a lot of weight to drag across the dirt (though lubricated by an occasional worker slipping under the leading edge). All those tons hardly sum to the common public relations' spin of unfathomable delivered volume, megalith-wise
Unnamed US government agencies leery of Environmentalist outrage at bulldozing Stonehenge to look underneath plan to quietly tunnel in from a rented bungalow in Salisbury, England. They intend to root around under each remaining upright slab and then excise the bottom inch of each stone for study. The cooperation of English housing inspectors has long been under lease. Reports of "natural subsidence secondary to ground water abeyance" are written, spell-checked, and ripe for Media leakage.
Too late! A shock brigade of semi-retired Seals and Delta Force commandos, eager entourage groupies of Dr. Schund, has already been there and gone. All that remains to be found underground is a handful of satisfactorily corroded coins, each embossed with a hairy star and datable to 2214 BC - and a missing inch of stone.
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