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Updated: May 9, 2025
The obelisk was erected in commemoration of the visit of the Bearnais, and his hunt with the beautiful Comtesse de Moret; the date is given below the arms of Navarre. That jealous woman, whose son was afterwards legitimatized, would not allow the arms of France to figure on the obelisk, regarding them as a rebuke.
The sun falls broadly over the area of the piazza, and shows the fountains in it; one a large basin with great sea-monsters, probably of Bernini's inventions, squirting very small streams of water into it; another of the fountains I do not at all remember; but the central one is an immense basin, over which is reared an old Egyptian obelisk, elevated on a rock, which is cleft into four arches.
The tourist who has just arrived at Kingstown by the steamer from Holyhead, and who takes his seat in the train for Dublin, may see from the window of the railway carriage an obelisk, not very imposing either in its height or in its sculptured form, which seems a little out of place amid the ordinary accessories of a railway and steamboat station.
The driver got down from the box, and a lively argument was begun inside for there were other occupants as to how Mr. Peters was to be disembarked; and I gathered from his frequent references to the "Shgyptian obelisk" that the engineering problem presented struck him as similar to the unloading of Cleopatra's Needle.
As now laid bare by the excavations of 1900, it is seen to consist of an artificial mound, with a great court in front to the eastward. On the mound was erected a truncated obelisk, the stone emblem of the Sun-god.
My guide made me pause and admire, and he likewise insisted on the tribute of my tear before an obelisk to slaughtered soldiers and a handsome memorial to burnt firemen. But perceiving my impatience to arrive at the grave of Maupassant, "Mais, monsieur," he protested, "il n'y a rien d'extraordinaire." "Vraiment!" said I, "c'est la l'extraordinaire."
A stare from the guide. "No thousan' year before he is born." Then an Egyptian obelisk. Again: "Michael Angelo?" "Oh, mon dieu, genteelmen! Zis is two thousan' year before he is born!" He grows so tired of that unceasing question sometimes, that he dreads to show us any thing at all.
Suddenly from out the breathless crowd rose a loud, clear voice, "Wet the ropes." There was inspiration in the suggestion; the architect acted upon it, and the obelisk at once took its stand on its base, where it has firmly remained ever since.
The draper's young man, who walked through the park with his arm round his young woman's waist, looked up at the obelisk, repeated its story, and became more serious.
In some of the oldest sculptures in Egypt, an obelisk is represented as standing on the top of a pyramid; and by this combination it was meant to signify the power of life triumphing over death. And hence the obelisk is the most suitable of all forms to indicate in our cemeteries the glorious truth of the resurrection, life rising victorious out of the transitory condition of death.
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