Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/101

Rh pauses to peruse walls deep-graven with colossal gods and kings, and still glowing here and there with the undying colours of 4000 years, the artistic taste is alike satisfied. So admirable, indeed, are the proportions of the whole that the stupendous bulk of its constituent parts is hardly realised. Derangement of their symmetry seems necessary to enable one to measure it in its full awfulness, as we do there, where one of these gigantic pillars has fallen and bows its hundreds of tons of weight and the superincumbent burden of its huge plinth, dislocated and askew, towards one of its fellows. The cause of this portentous displacement no man knows; but the vague tradition that ascribes it to the conqueror Cambyses may be safely dismissed. No mortal hands, relying solely on the strength of human muscles and the only known forces of an age that knew not of gunpowder could ever have done the work of inchoate destruction which is above our heads. Nothing short of an earthquake