Inside the burial chamber

I find these markings disturbing because I feel I should understand them and I don't. It would be easier to think of them as decorative markings rather than symbols, because symbols have a meaning and if they are symbols then they are closed to me. If they are merely decorative then perhaps they are no more significant than wall paper that looks 'nice'. But this chambered tomb should also be a place of strong emotion, reverence, grief, ritual, the placing of a fresh corpse among the stones, to lie in darkness on a shelf of stone and turn to dust. We deal with death in the same way, or Death deals with us in the same way, and we respond as ceremonial animals. At least I understand that death was a significant event for these people, for a family, a community, a tribe, so we have that in common, unlike the curlews, who, for all I know, grieve, for a lost mate, perhaps, but with no conception of death, no reverence, no expressive acts of grief, a marshy, uninhabited island, great gulls and fulmars, seals on the shore, burial chambers, sheep and the lapping then the lashing of the waves, and inlets to hide a boat in ... and being always on the qui vive, alert for danger and enemies is not so remote from us as we should like to think, but we see the evidence of the attitude all around us, it is instinct in us but instinct can atrophy, until our middle class apartment block is shelled ... again.