THE OBELISK SET UP.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5524, 10 December 1878, Page 3

THE OBELISK SET UP.

(From the Saturday Review,) At this dull season, with its gloom deepened by a series of horrible accidents, very little fine writing has been bestowed by the daily papers on the final adjustment of Cleopatra’s Needle. Descriptive reporters have been elsewhere employed. While the modest ceremony of Friday last was being enacted on the left bank of the Thames, the scenes of horror on the right bank occupied most men’s minds. Mr. Wilson and his coadjutors deserve our ■thanks, for tho quietness -with which they allowed what to them at least is a great event to pass off. There would have been something indecent in holding high festivity on board one Thames steamer near the Adelphi, while the corpse-crowded deck of another was being dragged through the mud at Woolwich, amid the’lamentations of thousands. This additional horror has been spared us, and we are thankful. Yet we find that there was rather more ceremony on the occasion than The Times would have us believe, and at_ least one remarkable. speech was delivered. It hardly seems, however, as if enough notice had been taken of the simplicity and comparative cheapness of the means employed for the adjustment of so great a block of stone. Fontana, with his thousands straining for a month ; Lebas, with his hundreds, are more than rivalled by Mr. Dixon with a dozen men. When the obelisk hung in the air, twenty feet above its future base, tbe modern' men of science might well have felt proud of the advance of engineering skill in the last few years. In fact, it the obelisk is good for anything, it is good as a standing example of ’ the power of mind over matter since the dawn of history. The great Thothmes, when he set it up against his temple at On, probably made a mound, dragged the atone to the top, and let it slide down into its. place, guided by thousands of devotees holding ropes, and trained to move in exact concert to the music of the priests. When the Romans moved Cleopatra’s Needle and Mr. Wilson’s obelisk to Alexandria, and placed them before the portico of Cassar’s monument, they probably wont to work very much in the French style, for they had learned the use of, pulleys and blocks ; and no doubt the subtle geometers of Alexandria were able to supply whatever might be wanting in theory to the practice of their conquerors. But neither Thothmes nor the Roman general could over have conceived tho idea of poising it in mid-airand of setting it on an end as a child setsninepin. Itisrocordedonthe great obelisk of Hatasoo, at Karnao, that it was removed from the quarry and sot up in seven months. The quarry was not a hundred and fifty miles off, and water carriage could bo used the whole way, probably to tho very site in the interior of the temple. But we may be pretty sure that water carriage in tho shape of a hydraulic lift was not employed, and that nothing but the direct strength of thousands of men raised tho tallest obelisk in tho world to tho upright position it has occupied for at least throe thousand years. Its companion, an equally noble block of granite, has fallen, and affords by its gigantic fragments a kind of measure for tho still upstanding column. With regard to the cost and conditions of the undertaking, a little more light has boon afforded. ■■ Some people have been puzzled to for the prominent position .of Mr. jwxon’s name. In the Queen’s telegram, for instance, it oven precedes Mr. Wilson’s. But we are now told that Mr. Wilson’s share in the business was simply that he offered a reward for tho_ bringing home of the obelisk ; while Mr. Dixon is tho engineer who claims that reward as having accomplished the task set him. It would seem, however, that Mr. Wilson’s £IO,OOO will only go two-thirds of tho way towards covering Mr. Dixon’s expenses, and that he will receive nothing for his own trouble. Thus, as Engineering points out, tho contribution of Mri Dixon nearly equals that of Mr. Wilson. In short, tbe obelisk has cost about £20,000, and as it is a gift we must not ask whether the money might not have been more profitably, laid out in some ether way, Which of , our' rich men will offer £20,000 to the builder of a new facade to the National Gallery, or to buy a few pictures, or to make a decent print and drawing-room, or even to put pedestals to the Elgin marbles ? Apart from such purely benevolent projects as model lodging-houses and orphanages, there are many openings for the employment of money) but while a kind of connection ia kept up in people's minds between almsgiving and religion, projects not of an eleemosynary character Buffer by cotuparieos. Mr. Wilwu and Mr.

Dixon will probably never be told that they have earned heaven by bringing over the obelisk of Thothraes, whereas, if they had spent their money on the propagation of certain sectarian opinions, they would have received many such pleasing assurances. There is one element of alloy in the congratulations which will pour in on Mr. Wilson and his coadjutor. The loss of the English sailors in the Bay of Biscay, and the subsequent greed of a Scottish crew, are disagreeable subjects for thought, Mr. Dixon made a mistake, the only one perhaps in all his arrangements, when he placed Maltese sailors on board his cigar ship ; audit is doubly annoying that brave Englishmen should have been lost through attendingto the cries of terror—a terror which turns out, in the event, to have been exaggerated. If the proceedings on Friday were hot of a very lively character, there were not wanting humorous elements for the benefit of the reporters. The mere list of the objects buried in two jars under the pedestal must provoke a smile. Nothing typical of the civilisation of our day seems to have been omitted,-except a betting-book and a willow pattern .plate. There were Bibles in various languages, presented by the Bible Society, who will probably never be called to account by the subscribers for such an appropriation of their funds. The sixteenth verse of the third chapter of St. John, translated into 216 languages, went in for the information of posterity; or perhaps we should say for their benefit. It must have been a very blessed though to the members of the Committee that if one single soul is able to understand one single language of the 216 when the obelisk falls, perhaps thirty generations hence, he may find under it a better revelation than that which Mr. Piazza Smyth has discovered in the sacred inches of the Great Pyramid. Some Smyth of the future, — if there are Englishmen, there will be Smyths, with or without a y, but none probably without an adnomeu—-some Smyth of the future may, however, like our own instructor, seek for ghostly comfort rather in the standard foot and the standard pound than in the versioles of the Bible Society. The circumference and diameter of the jar in standard obelisk inches, and its weight in standard obelisk ounces, will no doubt convey profound religious impressions. Should the photographs of a dozen pretty Englishwomen survive till then, learned treatises may be composed on the strange costumes of the prm-historio lady, her semi-nudity, her woad or rouge, as the case may be, her pinched waist, her brass-colored hair, and her brazen expression. The Sehlieraaun who comes to dig on the banks of the Thames may have far to penetrate before he reaches the summit of the obelisk. It would not be hard to calculate the period, at which the ground will have risen fifty feet. It is already sixteen feet above Roman London, and villas on the bank of the Walbrook are buried at a depth which would only leave six feet of the obelisk visible. There can be no doubt that the Thames flowed at high tides over all the present Strand, not in prse-historic times, but as late as the tenth century. It is not many years since we all rowed or steamed over the site of the obelisk or very much further inland. At any rate, the discoverer will have no difficulty in making his measurements. Ivory is a very lasting article; and an ivory rule, variously divided, down to the thousandth part of an inch, seems to have been, literally, rather a rule than an exception among the articles selected for burial. Of course, like the Alexandra feeding-bottle, the hydraulic model jack, the shilling razor, and the specimens of submarine cable, these things were chiefly put in by way of advertisement, not to the men of the future, but to those of our own generation; but they will also serve, like the Martello towers, for the puzzle of posterity. That object would, however, have been amply fulfilled without any aid from children’s toys or a box of cigars; for we read that, not only was Dr. Birch’s translation of the obelisk inscriptions, printedon vellum, among the contents of the jars, but a copy of Bradshaw’s “ Railway Guide,” which some bibliographer of the above-mentioned period will catalogue as a volume containing calculations as to the probable hours of starting of various trains, their destiny, and other prophecies, perhaps astrological. Let us at least hope that in the information of posterity one thing will not bo omitted. It is but due to our descendants that they should be told that, in the opinion of the legislator who delivered the inaugural oration, the erection of this obelisk “ closed one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of England.” Tbe honorable member went on to tell his audience, in a voice which reached the assemblage on the embankment while he stood on board the steamer, that this monolith had been the wonder of countless ages—a piece of news—we confess, which we did not expect. As obelisks twice as long exist not only in Egypt but at Rome, and as even the Paris example is half as high again, countless. ages seem to have made an unaccountable choice for the exercise of their admiration. Howbeit, the speaker proceeded to remark that “ tbe credit which, attached to its being brought to this country was due to the engineer”—a very interesting fact, on which he might well have enlarged. We are not told how the attachment was cemented ; but the speaker added an opinion that Mr. Dixon's skill was worthy of any age. We have already shown that, having been exercised on a stone which had already been the subject of engineering skill in all kinds of ages, this remark only expressed half the truth. We are next told that “ the generosity of Professor Wilson—(cheers) —con-' trusted favorably with that of the French nation, which made a public grant for the ereo-. tion of the monolith in the Place de la Concordebut the speaker seemed to have forgotten that the French expenses were nearly eight times as great. Finally came a sentiment in which alt will be content to acquiesce: —“ He trusted that the monument would long remain in its present position as an instance of English individual generosity and of English scientific skill.