bours sometimes high mountains and always boldly contoured hills and
rocks; however far up into the skies their summits might be carried, they
would still be dominated on one side or the other. Involuntarily the eye
demands from nature the same scale of proportions as are suggested by the
works of man. Where these are chiefly remarkable for their height, much of
their effect will be destroyed by the proximity of such hills as
Acrocorinthus or Lycabettus, to say nothing of Taygetus or Parnassus.

It is quite otherwise when the surface of the country stretches away on
every side with the continuity and flatness of a lake. In these days none
of the great buildings to which we have been alluding have preserved more
than a half of their original height;[152] all that remains is a formless
mass encumbered with heaps of _debris_ at its foot, and yet, as every
traveller in the country has remarked, these ruined monuments have an
extraordinary effect upon the general appearance of the country. They give
an impression of far greater height than they really possess (Fig. 36). At
certain hours of the day, we are told, this illusion is very strong: in the
early morning when the base of the mound is lost in circling vapours and
its summit alone stands up into the clear sky above and receives the first
rays of the sun; and in the evening, when the whole mass rises in solid
shadow against the red and gold of the western sky. At these times it is
easy to comprehend the ideas by which the Chaldaean architect was animated
when he created the type of these many-storied towers and scattered them
with such profusion over the whole face of the country. The chief want of
his land was the picturesque variety given by accidents of the ground to
its nearest neighbours, a want he endeavoured to conceal by substituting
these pyramidal temples, these lofty pagodas, as we are tempted to call
them, for the gentle slopes and craggy peaks that are so plentiful beyond
the borders of Chaldaea. By their conspicuous elevation, and the enormous
expenditure of labour they implied, they were meant to break the uniformity
of the great plains that lay about them; at the same time, they would
astonish contemporary travellers and even that remote posterity for whom no
more than a shapeless heap of ruins would be left. They would do more than
all the writings of all the historians to celebrate the power and genius of
the race that dared thus to correct and complete th