INTO THE LAND OF EGYPT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21156, 1 October 1938, Page 9

INTO THE LAND OF EGYPT

By

H. V. MORTON

CHAPTER 13

WHERE CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE CAME FROM

"Do you know,” said the young engineer . , “confound these flies. 1 ' And he made a savage swish with a fly-whisk towards his left ear, where the king of flies, the fly that never leaves you, the fly that possesses the determination of the crime-reporter plus the insurance canvasser—the fly that every one who has been to Egypt knows so well —was giving him trouble. . Do

you know,” he continued, “that Cleopatra’s Needle was cut out of this quarry?” That's rather a queer thought.” “Oh, I don’t know,” said the young engineer. “I suppose it had to come from somewhere.” Like all engineers. young or old, he was practical.

“Yes, I suppose it had to come from somewhere,” I said, “but don't you think it’s rather curious to contrast this hot, and, might I add, flyinfested, quarry in Aswan, within a few miles of the Sudan frontier, with the place where Cleopatra’s Needle is standing now? Think of it on the Thames Embankment, as black as ink, little boys playing round the sphinxes in the lunch hour, and the Thames giving its pedestal great muddy kisses at high tide. And at night the tramcars go sliding past, lit and yellow. It’s part of London now. We should miss it terribly if anything happened to it. All kinds of people would write to the papers and form committees. Yet it was once part of this . . .” And I looked round at the hot, redochre rocks of the Aswan granite quarries, which are still gashed with the marks of the stonemasons who worked there thousands of years ago.

“By jove. it is rather strange when you put it like that,” said the young engineer, fanning himself with a flywhisk.

Yes. my young engineer, and it's even stranger to picture the time when naked red men stood In this quarry at Aswan and bashed at the rock with balls of dolerite, cutting the obelisk out of its hard bed; a time when London had never been heard of. when the banks of the Thames were a wild forest marsh where wolves howled on winter nights. Centuries were to pass, and Cleopatra’s Needle was to become an antique even to the ancients, before

London was heard of; before Roman troops, ordered to invade Britain, mutinied because they refused to serve outside the coniines of the world.

The young engineer looked thoughtful, even a trifle soulful, and said;—“lf stones could speak—oh, confound these flies—l suppose Cleopatra’s Needle could spin us a bit of a yam. ...” I suppose it could. It is a sort of talisman that has been handed on to three great civilisations. The Egyptian civilisation passed to the Greek and from the ruins of the Greek civilisation the English picked it and carried it captive to their northern land. It has stood in Heliopolis, Alexandria and London. It was standing in Heliopolis when Moses was a priest there. He must have passed it every day on his way to lectures. It had been standing at Alexandria for about fourteen years when the Flight into Egypt took place. It was still standing there when St. Mark preached Christianity to the Alexandrians. It has seen a lot of history and a lot of life.

I was glad to have stood in Its native quarry, and to have seen the long gashes in the rock from which it might have come. I told the young engineer that I should never pass it on the Thames Embankment without remembering this furnace of red rocks sliced and scarfed by the stonemasons of long ago. He said that he felt like that, too. “But tire most Interesting thing about the quarry,” he said, “is the unfinished obelisk. If we climb up

there we can have a look at it. There is nothing like it anywhere in the world. I suppose you may have wondered how the ancient Egyptians managed to cut enormous solid shafts of granite,” he continued, as we started to climb. “It’s been a puzzle to engineers, I can assure you. Well, nothing of much practical value was known about it until an obelisk was discovered in this quarry which has never been detached from its bed. It has been cut away all round except underneath—almost as if the ancient Egyptians had left it there on purpose to show us how they did their stuff.”

“But why did they leave it?” I asked.

“They discovered a flaw in the stone,” he said. “It must have been a great disappointment, because if they could have got it out safely it would have been the biggest obelisk ever quarried—just over twice the size of Cleopatra’s Needle. It really is an enormous thing and I think you’ll get a thrill when you see It. . .’’

At this moment we came out on a carved plateau of granite from which

a small wooden bridge led to the obe—lt is an amazing sight! Lying in its bed. and separated from the rock around by a deep trench two and a half feet wide, is what might have been the largest shaft of stone in the world. “Isn't he a monster?” cried the engineer with enthusiasm. “He’s 137 feet long and, if they had been able to detach him from his bed, he would have weighed 1168 tons! That would have given the transport experts

something to think about! Imagine floating down the Nile to Luxor!” He then delivered an interesting lecture on how the ancient Egyptians quarried their stone. All over the quarry there are signs of their workmanship. After having drawn a line along the area of stone to be detached, they then punched holes along these lines at frequent intervals, wedged them with wood, poured water on the wood and allowed the expansion of the wood, which would occur quickly in the great heat of Aswan, to split the rock. It looks simple, doesn’t it?” said the engineer, “but imagine the skill necessary first of all to pick the right kind of stone, and then the nice judgment necessary to split it along the right lines. They must have sunk test trenches in big works of this kind in order to find out the condition of the stone underneath, and save the labour of working on rock with fissures in it. Then look how beautifully smooth the sides and top of the obelisk are. It’s hard to believe that it was done by bashing the stone with balls of a hard, ironlike stone called dolerite. Even when the obelisk had been detached, there was the complicated problem, in the absence of steam cranes, of lifting it from its bed, of rolling it to the enormous barges that must have carried such stones down the Nile.”

The obelisk that never left its matrix is a greater monument to the ingenuity of the ancient Egyptians than any obelisk now standing. It illustrates, too, a thing which perhaps all travellers in Egypt do not realise when they see colossal pieces of granite up and down the country—the fact that this stone was quarried hundreds of miles away. The admiration of centuries has been lavished on the architects and the stonemasons of ancient Egypt, but it is not often that we think of the men who brought these great stones safely to their destinations.