India's megaliths

Check out those stones!!!!

This is an area of India that the British called Little Scotland. The books all say it is because the hilly mountains, streams and forests are a reminder of Scotland. That may be true, but I think they called it Little Scotland becaue of the megalithic stones that can be found in many places. These are amazing. They are products of the Khasi Tribe. This tribe, which is one of the major tribes in this area still holds these stones sacred. Still, when one of great importance dies, a large stone is put up in their honor. Such a stone rising requires great ceremony and sacrifice. They sacrifice chickens and goats and have great ritual.

The stones are still greatly honored and there are still rituals done at them. They are very sacred; there are stories of people wanting to move one to another location and after they moved it and got home . . . they died. So the stone was taken back to its original location and put back up.

There are stones you can see in the villages we drove by. We saw one area fenced off with about 6-8 pretty large standing stones in it. I said it looked like a family graveyard in Kentucky.

Today or tomorrow we’re going to an area that has the largest standing stones in the area.

This really, really did remind me of the stones we saw in Scotland and Ireland.

The Khasi people still worship the sun, hold the forest to be sacred, and hold nature to be divine. Some of the people who are still active in the Kharsi Tribe have fly flags from their homes that are red with a white circle in the center, and in the circle is a red rooster. This is because there was a time when the sun left the earth. All the animals got together and tried to talke the sun into coming back. None, not even the humans, the elephants, the rhinos, or anyone could get the sun to come back. A rooster said “Let me try.” All the other animals laughed and asked “How’s a little bird like you going to call the great, mighty sun back.” The rooster said, “Please, let me try.” So, it went off and a little while later the sun came back to earth and life was able to continue. Since that time the rooster has been the sign of the Khasi people.

This area is about 5000 feet above sea level, and the people, rather than what we think of as Indian features, are more mongoloid or asian in their looks. Walking through one of the small villages reminded me of the people in the High Andes. The way they dressed, the way they looked and the whole sense was like we were back in Bolivia in the alto plano of the Andes. WOW, Scotland and Brazil all in one small area.

The bad news is that to drive 26 kilometers took us over 2 hours!!!! Tiny roads, more traffic than I’ve ever seen on a small road, and curves, curves, curves make for a journey that averages about . . . slow, slow slow.

It is lovely hear. But I got car sick for the first time in about 10 years. I found that I packed my “patches” and have one on. I hope that even though they are expired they’ll work just fine.

Well, I need go to see if reception is open yet so I can try to rent a phone card to get this and the other post I wrote actually posted.

We’re getting anxious to be back home again. It’s lovely here, but as Dorothy said “There’s no place like home.”

[I was only able to post one of my photos. It took half an hour to post these two posts I had already written and just pasted here and to load one photo]