Digging up the (ice-bound) Now

Beneath the melting permafrost,
beneath the detritus of three millennia,
beneath the blown volcanic ash
(compacted now, and granite hard),
beneath deep chalk and limestone beds,
the ruins of the ancient town,
and as we worked we stumbled on
"Cathedral Cave", the ice still hard,
the trees, cadavers, skeletons
and giant fungi sheathed in ice
as though in plaster, waiting for
the sculptor who would come to cast
them for posterity. Most strange of all,
the long lost stones: Stonehenge itself
(the cross stones long since fallen):
not seen by man in several cycles of the ice,
believed by some to have the power
to offer man his lost humanity.

We started work at once to free the stones,
to chip away the ice, but it seemed welded on
and able to renew itself. In desperation
we tried with fire, but only cracked a monolith -
and still the ice refused to budge.
The magic powers we'd heard so much about
seemed anti-man, not pro-humanity.
Then came the old man out of nowhere,
a simpleton, who seemed to have the key.
He's mumbo-jumboed over one stone now
for the past month - and partly thawed the ice.
Maybe He is "The Way"...

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By some mismanagement I didn't see this wonder picture by Jinksy until the week was up (yesterday).  No matter, it was so brilliant that I could not let it pass. So with aplogies to her for its lateness, here is what would have been my contribution to her  prompt.