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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XII, Issue 111, 12 May 1877, Page 4

The following is from the Echo'. — Our feminine readers who ao deftly ply their needles may think that £10,000 is a very large sum to pay to remove a tieadle from one conntry to another. But then the needle in question is nearly 70 feet long, and is made, not of steel, but of stone. Presented to the British Government aa long ago as 1819, Cleopatra's Needle has been lying in the sand at Alexandria because the British House of Commons has always been too economical to pay for the removal of the gift. It is an illustration of the power of female beauty that Cleopatra should have given her name to an obelisk made long before she was thought of. It is constructed of the red granite from the quarries of Syene, and is one of a pair of obelisks that originally atood at the door of the temple of the setting sun. But in Cleopatra's time it was removed to the temple of Csesar at Alexandria, and from that date forward has dome the name of the conqueror-conquering beauty. The land on which the obelisk lies was some time ago leased by the Egyptian Khedive to a Greek merchant, and as the great relic was in the way, and the owners would not remove it, it was covered up with sand. What the national Treasury would not do, the resources of a private English gentleman are about to accomplish. He has given £10,000 to pay the cost of the removal to London of this long-neglected present. The mode of doing this suggested by the engineers is novel and ingenious. It is in fact nothing else than to inclose the big needle in a needle-case, and in that way float it out'of the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic to the hyperborean shores. The sand is to be dug away from the obelisk, and an iron cylinder built round it. This cylinder is again to be sub-divided into watertight compartments. When this has been done, the whole concern is to be rolled into the sea, in which it will float like a huge cigar. The reserved manholes are then to be opened, and ballast enough to steady it itjto be I t l wed away. A rudder, a mast, a light deck, anchor, chains, and pump are to be attached; and in this way, under the convoy of a steamtug, the pilar of the Sun god in the preparation of which hundreds of Egyptiun slaves (oiled 4000 years ago, is to be carried off in triumph to the Tnames Embankment, where it is to be re-erected. It is an illustration of the economy of modern engineering that £10,000 will cover the cost of the removal of thia obelisk, while it cost £80,000 in 1833 to remove a similar one to Paris.