Cleopatra's Needle

This brmgmg to .London o i Uleopatra s needie is an evebt noway novel in character, yet it gives rise to some curious reflections on the way of fate. The old Egyptian King who reared this obelisk would be much am:ized to mineas its journey to an alien iand so strong a witness to his wisioni and liis futility. If any peoples might be surprised at the mockery of time, the anoient Egyptians might. They reared their temples and their heaven-pointing obelisks for eternity, and certainly deemed their land as eternal as their monuments. Oleopatra's needie had never anything to do with the sumptuous Queen, but perhaps received its name in some humorons traveler's comment, for in her time the ambition that carved such weighty monuments in one block from the quarry did not exist; only miniature obelisks, flve or ten feet hign, were made then, and the colossal monoliths of the age of the Pharaohs were being carried away by Eoman conquerors. This one was dragged, with another like it, down to Aiexandria in that period, and but for some change of rule in Bome would hare doubtless graoed the Eternal City with twelve that were taken there. They c&me from further south, way up the Nüe; this present obelisk and the one that adorns the Place of Concord in Paris may have stood before a temple of Thebes, er Heliopolis, but that we do not know. We know that Thothmes III., who reigned thirty and some odd centuries ago, first raised it to preserve his name immortal; but a mere name on a stone is not so vivid and interesting as the figure of that unnamed Pharaoh of the Hebrew narrative, who would not let Israel go. Perhaps Thothmes III. was that Pharaoh, and,if it were proved, then indeed he would begin to live. It does not bear alone that name of Thothmes, for Eameses the Great, whom the Greeks called Sesostris, graved his name upon it about a century later; and still another of his successors added his irrelevant name and titles, much as a school-boy of ;o-day scratches his initials on Bunker Eill monument. Preeisely what the obelisk meant to ;he ancient Egyptiaus no one can oer;aiuly teil. It was a relagious symbol, 'or everything seems to have borne for ;hat race a religious meaning. lts name in their tongue signified "the rays of the sun," aceording to Pliny, and that and its derived Greek name of obelisk (which means a skewer or spit - whence naturally, "needie") both point, in the estimation of many scholars, to a connection with the ancient worship of the sun, as the generative principie, by the means of phallic symbols. Other scbolirs scout the notion as wholly wild. The Tachin and Boaz of Solomon's temple are believed to have been obelisks, for ;hus the Egyptian obolisks were placed, n pairs, at the entrance of temples, and ;here are archseologists who consider the paired towers on Christian cathedrals a nodification of the primitive obeliskal dea. We cannot teil how much one re.igion borrows from those that have gone }efore. Ponome, one of the students of Egyptology, says that there are no obe.is'ks found on the west bank of the Nile, is no pyramids are found on the east bank m'Egypt proper, " the obelisk appearing to be a decoration of the cities }f the living, svmbolized by the rising of the sun; as the pyramid is of those of ;he dead, svmbolized by the setting of ;hat luiainary."