Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/87

Rh the illimitable spaces of the desert. The periods of which we have any record in our own or in European history are all too ludicrously short for comparison. Eighteen times as long a period as divides us from the birth of Shakespeare; fourteen times as long as the New World has existed for the Old. What measure of the awful age of these monuments do we get from such comparisons? Or, again, a good deal of water has flowed through the valley of the Thames since Cæsar crossed it at the head of his legions; yet the distance which we have to look back to descry the first historic conqueror of our islands through the haze of the ages is but one-third of the distance which would have had to be imaginatively spanned by Cæsar himself if the conqueror of Ptolemaic Egypt had striven to recall the builder of the Great Pyramid. The 800 years during which that infinitely complex, tremulously nervous, exquisitely refined organism which we call modern England has evolved itself