Thirty or more there were--Apollo, Zeus, heroes, women, centaurs,
horses. Arms were gone, heads were broken, legs were lost. The
excavators fitted together all the pieces and set the mended statues up
side by side as they had been in the gable. They found, too, the carved
marble slabs that showed the labors of Herakles. But even these were not
the lovely things that people had hoped to see from Olympia. They were
rather stiff and ungraceful. They had not been made by the greatest
artists. In the temple of Hera one day men were digging in clay. Over
all the rest of Olympia was only sand. The excavators wondered for a
long time why this one spot should have clay. Where could it have come
from? They read their old books over and over. They thought and studied.
At last they said:
"The walls of the temple must have been made of sun-dried brick. In the
old days they must have been covered with plaster. This and the roof
kept them dry. But the plaster cracked off, and the roof fell in, and
the rain and the floods turned the bricks back to clay again."
Then one May morning, when the men were digging in the clay, a workman
lifted off his spadeful of dirt, and white marble gleamed out. After
that there was careful work, with all the excavators standing about to
watch.
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