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Updated: May 27, 2025
But in this case it was not built of masonry, but shaped by the hand of man out of a single gigantic granite monolith of the sort that are sometimes to be met with in Africa, that thousands or millions of years ago had been left standing thus when the softer rock around it was worn away by time and weather.
In the annals of the great Asshur-izirpal inscribed on the Nimrud monolith, that prince, while commemorating his war-like exploits, informs us that he set up his sculptures at the sources of the Tsupnat river alongside of sculptures previously set up by his ancestors Tiglath-Pileser and Tiglathi-Nin.
An enormous monolith, now broken, but once 5 mètres high, speaks for the energy of bygone generations, when this rock was carried up from the coast, probably for a monument to some great chief. While the women were gathering food for the evening meal we returned to Vao. The breeze had stiffened in the midst of the channel, and one old woman's canoe had capsized.
And often in walking through the San Francisco streets the eye, ranging along the crowd of pedestrians of average California stature, will strike on a man who bulks a whale, a leviathan, a dread-naught, beside the others, and rises a column, a monolith, a tower above them. He is certainly upstanding, this average California male running to bulk and a little to flesh.
I have seen a man professing to feel faint at the odour of crushed geranium leaves. I saw it, shortly after its return to dry land, in a shed near the harbour of Cotrone; the Taranto museum has now claimed it. It is a basin of purple-veined pavonazzetto marble. Originally a monolith, it now consists of two fragments; the third and smallest is still missing.
So the whole bulk of this stately piece of rock, this sky-cleaving monolith, is above the line of eternal snow. Yet while all its giant neighbors have the look of being built of solid snow, from their waists up, the Matterhorn stands black and naked and forbidding, the year round, or merely powdered or streaked with white in places, for its sides are so steep that the snow cannot stay there.
In the sculpture galleries of the British Museum there are several examples preserved to us from the ancient Empire of Assyria, and one described as the "Monolith of Shahnaneser II., King of Assyria, B.C. 850," is almost the exact counterpart of the headstones which are in vogue to-day. It stands 5 ft. 6 in. high, is 2 ft. 9 in. wide, and 8 inches thick.
A pair of gray eyes, red-rimmed and lashless, looked forlornly out of a countenance which was flattened something after the fashion of a pumpkin, and surmounted by a Don Quixote nose that rose out of it like a monolith above a plain.
Here is a passage which deserves to be quoted again and again: 'I have little taste, I confess, for uniformity; I leave that to the Jacobins. My ideal of a nation is not a monolith, nor a bronze formed at a single casting. It is better that a people should be composed of diverse elements and of many races. And the same argument applies to religions.
"Unquestionably," replied the nobleman; "but take care not to chip the edges of the cover as you put in your crow-bars, for I propose to carry off the tomb and present it to the British Museum." The whole company bent their efforts to displacing the monolith. Wooden wedges were carefully driven in, and presently the huge stone was moved and slid down the props prepared to receive it.
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