The approach to this
portico, from the Nile, was through an avenue two miles long, composed
of sphynxes, statues, and obelisks, twenty, sixty, and a hundred
feet in height. The palace itself (as well as he could remember)
was, in one direction, two miles long, and might have been
altogether about seven in circuit. Its walls were richly painted all
over, within and without, with hieroglyphics. He would not pretend
to assert that even fifty or sixty of the Doctor's Capitols might have
been built within these walls, but he was by no means sure that two or
three hundred of them might not have been squeezed in with some
trouble. That palace at Carnac was an insignificant little building
after all. He (the Count), however, could not conscientiously refuse
to admit the ingenuity, magnificence, and superiority of the
Fountain at the Bowling Green, as described by the Doctor. Nothing
like it, he was forced to allow, had ever been seen in Egypt or
elsewhere.
I here asked the Count what he had to say to our railroads.
"Nothing," he replied, "in particular." They were rather slight,
rather ill-conceived, and clumsily put together. They could not be
compared, of course, with the vast, level, direct, iron-grooved
causeways upon which the Egyptians conveyed entire temples and solid
obelisks of a hundred and fifty feet in altitude.
I spoke of our gigantic mechanical forces.
He agreed that we knew something in that way, but inquired how I
should have gone to work in getting up the imposts on the lintels of
even the little palace at Carnac.
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