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Updated: August 16, 2024
We reined up our horses and stood with our faces toward the road, over which we had just passed, looking to catch the first view of the Queen. The sun was just rising above the horizon, and touching with its golden color the higher objects of the scene the tall cedars the gray crags, which here and there jutted out into the plain the towers, and columns, and obelisks of the still slumbering city.
Hatshepsût, however, in order to bring in her obelisks between the pylons of Thothmes I., opened a breach in the south wall, and overthrew sixteen of the columns which stood in that spot. Thothmes III., probably finding certain parts of the structure unworthy of the god, rebuilt the first pylon, and also the double sanctuary, which he renewed in the red granite of Syene.
It might thus seem, that by placing obelisks in our churchyards in association with the dead, we were violating their original significance, and guilty of adding another to the many incongruities which have arisen from adopting pagan symbols in Christian burying-places. But in reality we find a deeper reason for the association.
What if some Audubon should say, "For you I will go through all the forests to find out the life and history of the winged creatures, from the humming-bird to hawk and eagle?" What if Niebuhr should say, "For you I will decipher the monuments, all ruins and obelisks, all man's parchments and manuscripts for setting forth man's upward progress through the centuries?"
The figure was existing here as early as 1608. In the churchyard, at the east end of the church, is an altar tomb, with the angles sculptured like trees, spreading over a strange confusion of obelisks, pyramids, crocodiles, shells, etc., and, at one end, a hydra. It is the monument of John Tradescant and his son, two of the earliest British naturalists.
We judge that a mountain is very distant when, after traveling many miles toward it, it seems still as distant as ever. Now, in tracing the history of the pyramids, the obelisks, the gigantic statues, and the vast columnar ruins of the Nile, we may go back twenty-five hundred years, without, apparently, making any progress whatever toward reaching their origin. Such was Egypt.
The whole front of the glacier is gashed and sculptured into a maze of shallow caves and crevasses, and a bewildering variety of novel architectural forms, clusters of glittering lance-tipped spires, gables, and obelisks, bold outstanding bastions and plain mural cliffs, adorned along the top with fretted cornice and battlement, while every gorge and crevasse, groove and hollow, was filled with light, shimmering and throbbing in pale-blue tones of ineffable tenderness and beauty.
The blow that had fallen upon his own little circle had made the old man forget the awful vision which perchance menaced the whole universe with destruction; but his grandson could not banish the sight and, when he had passed the fore-court and was approaching the outermost pylons his imagination, under the tension of anxiety and grief, made the shadows of the obelisks appear to be dancing, while the two stone statues of King Rameses, on the corner pillars of the lofty gate, beat time with the crook they held in their hands.
The vast granite quarries of Finland supply the Tsars with these stupendous columns, just as the granite quarries of Syene on the Nile furnished the Pharaohs with obelisks. These enormous masses are too heavy to be conveyed on wheels, the only practicable mode of transit is on rollers. In this way each of the sixty-feet columns for St.
They were the very men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees, of dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals of gods, whose very names it was impiety to utter, of ancient dynasties, which had left behind them monuments surpassing all the works of later times, of towns like provinces, of rivers like seas, of stupendous walls, and temples, and pyramids, of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops of the mountains, of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of Memphis.
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