It was splendid.

It went crashing down the hillside, tearing up saplings, mowing bushes down like grass, ripping and crushing and smashing every thing in its path--eternally splintered and scattered a wood pile at the foot of the hill, and then sprang from the high bank clear over a dray in the road--the negro glanced up once and dodged--and the next second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame cooper-shop, and the coopers swarmed out like bees.

Then we said it was perfectly magnificent, and left.

Because the coopers were starting up the hill to inquire.
Still, that mountain, prodigious as it was, was nothing to the Pyramid of Cheops.

I could conjure up no comparison that would convey to my mind a satisfactory comprehension of the magnitude of a pile of monstrous stones that covered thirteen acres of ground and stretched upward four hundred and eighty tiresome feet, and so I gave it up and walked down to the Sphynx.
After years of waiting, it was before me at last.