astonishment upon
two massive towers or pylons, broader at the base than at the summit,
two hundred feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet high, crowned by a
gigantic cornice, with their whole surface covered with coloured
sculptures, representing one of the great dramas in the reign of a
victorious monarch. Above them would rise the tall masts of coloured
cedar-wood, inserted in sinkings chased into the wall, surmounted by
the expanded banners of the king, or the heraldic bearings of the
temple floating in the breeze. Between the huge propylons opened up
the great gateway of the temple, sixty feet high, which led into a
vast court, surrounded by columns and open to the sky. Beyond were
walls whose roofs were supported by a forest of enormous pillars,
which seemed to have been raised by giants. Each hall diminished in
size, but increased in sacredness, until the inmost sanctuary was
reached; small, dark, and awful in its obscurity. Here was the holy
shrine in the shape of a boat or ark, having in it a kind of chest
partially veiled, in which was hid the mystic symbol of the god. Like
the tabernacle of Israel, the common people were not allowed to go
farther than the outer court beyond the obelisks; only kings and
priests being permitted to penetrate into the interior recesses, there
to observe the ritual ceremonies of the mysterious Egyptian worship.
On the plan of the Egyptian temple were modelled the sacred buildings
of the Jews; and the famous pillars of burnished brass, wonderful for
their workmanship and their costly material, which Solomon erected in
the court of his temple, called Jachin and Boaz, had their prototypes
in the obelisks of the Nile.

The obelisk belongs essentially to a level country; and there is no
habitable region in the world so uniformly flat and unbroken by any
elevations or depressions of surface as the valley of the Nile. There
it produces its greatest effect; its size is not dwarfed by
surrounding heights, and comes out by contrast with the small objects
that diversify the plain. It forms a conspicuous landmark, a salient
point on which the eye may rest with relief as it takes in the wide
featureless horizon. In an artificial landscape, where there is no
wild unmixed nature, where every inch of ground is cultivated, it is
the appropriate culmination of that triumph of human art which is
visible everywhere. It was a sense of this harmony of relation that
induced the builders of the great