Whereupon chariots were harnessed and messengers sped south to the red-hot granite quarries of Assuan.
* * *
Now see the architect drawing the shape of Cleopatra's Needle in the virgin rock. See hundreds of naked backs bent over the stone, pounding, pounding, pounding month after month in the savage heat with no tools but hard balls of dolomite; and the whips crack over the sweating bodies and flicker in the heat and hiss like the tongues of serpents.
In a year the whim of Pharaoh is bashed from the quarry in blood and tears. His titles are set upon it, and it stands, painted and glorious, fronting the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis. On its tip is a cap of electrum that catches the sun, so that travellers in the desert looking towards the city of On see a pillar with a fire blazing upon it.... Look!
A cloud of dust; and in the heart of it gilded chariots. The white horses are pulled up on their haunches, the nodding ostrich plumes on their head collars rise and fall, the fan bearers come forward, the troops stand at ease, and above the kneeling priests is the Pharaoh, that ancient superman, inspecting his monument from a burnished car.
"Quite good. The god is pleased."
* * *
Time passes. Moses, who was a priest in Heliopolis, sees the obelisk every day. The frogs of the Plagues hop and chirrup on its plinth. Over a hundred years pass, and Rameses the Great, who loved himself dearly, carves his name on the column, usurping it. A thousand years pass, and it is moved to Cleopatra's capital at Alexandria! Here it survives four great empires. Thrones rock and fall, dynasties fade like mists. The world changes. Two thousand years pass by, and a new race of men come to power. They pick Cleopatra's Needle out of the sand, enclose it in a huge steel cylinder, give it a deck, a keel, a rudder, put a crew aboard and tug it across the sea towards England. Prosperous winds favour the voyage for the first few weeks; then, in the dreaded Bay of Biscay, Cleopatra's Needle pitches with such violence that the tug's captain cuts her adrift with her crew aboard her. How different from her last voyage three thousand years previously, when the Egyptian slaves floated her on the sunlit Nile for the delight of Pharaoh! As she rolls and tosses five sailors from the tug volunteer to go out to the abandoned obelisk ship. They are swept under and are drowned. Eventually the Cleopatra's crew are saved and the tug watches her drift away over the stormy seas. Sixty days pass and then news is received that Cleopatra's Needle was tugged into Vigo by a ship whose owners received two thousand pounds for their services. Eventually, tugged by an M.P.'s yacht the Egyptian stone arrives in England.
Here, forty-seven years ago, they placed it beside a cold, grey river, and some unknown hand penned the following epitaph to it in the morning:
This monument as some supposes
Was looked on in old days by Moses;
It passed in time to Greeks and Turks,
And was stuck up here by the Board of Works.