m eight feet in height
downwards, in the British Museum, in the Florentine Museum in
Florence, in Benevento in Italy, and in the town of Alnwick in
Northumberland.

The oldest of all the obelisks is the beautiful one of rosy granite
which stands alone among the green fields on the banks of the Nile not
far from Cairo. It is the gravestone of a great ancient city which has
vanished and left only this relic behind. That city was the
Bethshemesh of Scripture, the famous On, which is memorable to all
Bible readers as the residence of the priest Potipherah whose daughter
Asenath Joseph married. The Greeks called it Heliopolis, the city of
the sun, because there the worship of the sun had its chief centre and
its most sacred shrines. It was the seat of the most ancient
university in the world, to which youthful students came from all
parts of the world, to learn the occult wisdom which the priests of On
alone could teach. Thales, Solon, Eudoxus, Pythagoras, and Plato, all
studied there, perhaps Moses too. It was also the birthplace of the
sacred literature of Egypt, where were written on papyrus leaves the
original chapters of the oldest book in the world, generally known as
the "Book of the Dead," giving a most striking account of the
conflicts and triumphs of the life after death; a whole copy or
fragment of which every Egyptian, rich or poor, wished to have buried
with him in his coffin, and portions of which are found inscribed on
every mummy case and on the walls of every tomb. In front of one of
the principal temples of the sun, in this magnificent city, stood
along with a companion, long since destroyed, the solitary obelisk
which we now behold on the spot. It alone, as I have said, has
survived the wreck of all the glory of the place, as if to assure us
that what is given to God, however ignorantly and superstitiously,
endures, while all the other works of man perish. It was constructed
by Usirtesen I., who is supposed to have reigned two thousand eight
hundred years before Christ, and has outlasted all the dynastic
changes of the land, and still stands where it originally stood nearly
forty-seven centuries ago. What appears of its shaft above ground is
sixty-eight feet in height, but its base is buried in the mud of the
Nile; and year after year the inundation of the river deposits its
film of soil around its foot, and buries it still deeper in its sacred
grave. Down the centre of each of its four faces runs a line