"Nor so large," added Rollo.
"And I don't believe that there is any way to get to the top of it," added Rollo.
"No," said Mr. George, "there is not. The column in the Place Vendome is hollow, and has a staircase inside; but this obelisk is solid from top to bottom, and is formed of one single stone. That is the great wonder of it."
THE OBELISK.
"Look up," said Mr. George, "to the top of it. It is as high as a steeple. See how large it is, too, at the base. Think how enormously heavy such an immense stone must be. What a work it must have been to lift it up and stand it on its end! Besides, it does not rest upon the ground, but upon another monstrous stone, the pedestal of which is nearly thirty feet high; so that, in setting it up in its place, the engineers had not only to lift it up on end, but they had to raise the whole mass, bodily, twenty or thirty feet into the air. I suppose it was one of the greatest lifts that ever was made.
"There is another thing that is very curious about the obelisk," continued Mr. George, "and that is its history. It was not made originally for this place. It was made in Egypt, thousands and thousands of years ago, nobody knows how long. There are several others of the same kind still standing. Some years ago, this one and another were given to the French by the government of Egypt, and the French king sent a large company of men to take this one down and bring it to Paris. They built an immense vessel on purpose for transporting it. This vessel they sent to Egypt. It went up the Nile as near to the place where the obelisk stood as it could go. The place was called Luxor. The obelisk stood back at some distance from the river; and there were several Arab huts near it, which it was necessary to pull down. There were also several other houses in the way by the course which the obelisk must take in going to the river. The French engineers bought all these houses, and pulled them down. Then they made a road leading from the place where the obelisk stood to the river. Then they cased the whole stone in wood, to prevent its getting broken or injured on the way. Then they lowered it down by means of immense machines which they constructed for the purpose, and so proceeded to draw it to the river. But with all their machines, it was a prodigiously difficult work to get it along. It took eight hundred men to move it, and so slowly did it go that these eight hundred men worked three months in getting it to the landing. There they made a great platform, and so rolled it on board the float. There was a steamer at hand to take it in tow, and it was brought to France. It then took five or six months to bring it across the country from the sea shore to Paris.
"When, at last, they got it here, it took them nearly a year to construct the machines for raising it. They built the pedestal for it to stand upon, which you see is as high as a two-story house, and then appointed a day for the raising. All the world, almost, came to see. This whole square was full. There were more than a hundred thousand persons here. The king came, and his family, and all his generals and great officers. It was the greatest raising that ever was seen."
"Why, there must have been just as great a raising," said Rollo, "when they first put it up in Egypt."