His guide held on for more than a mile up the great main street, crossed in the centre of the city, at right angles, by one equally magnificent, at each end of which, miles away, appeared, dim and distant over the heads of the living stream of passengers, the yellow sand-hills of the desert; while at the end of the vista in front of them gleamed the blue harbour, through a network of countless masts.
At last they reached the quay at the opposite end of the street; and there burst on Philammon's astonished eyes a vast semicircle of blue sea, ringed with palaces and towers....He stopped involuntarily; and his little guide stopped also, and looked askance at the young monk, to watch the effect which that grand panorama should produce on him.
'There!--Behold our works! Us Greeks!--us benighted heathens! Look at it and feel yourself what you are, a very small, conceited, ignorant young person, who fancies that your new religion gives you a right to despise every one else.

Did Christians make all this?
Did Christians build that Pharos there on the left horn--wonder of the world?
Did Christians raise that mile-long mole which runs towards the land, with its two drawbridges, connecting the two ports?
Did Christians build this esplanade, or this gate of the Sun above our heads?
Or that Caesareum on our right here?
Look at those obelisks before it!' And he pointed upwards to those two world-famous ones, one of which still lies on its ancient site, as Cleopatra's Needle.

'Look up! look up, I say, and feel small--very small indeed! Did Christians raise them, or engrave them from base to point with the wisdom of the ancients?
Did Christians build that Museum next to it, or design its statues and its frescoes--now, alas! re-echoing no more to the hummings of the Attic bee?
Did they pile up out of the waves that palace beyond it, or that Exchange?
or fill that Temple of Neptune with breathing brass and blushing marble?
Did they build that Timonium on the point, where Antony, worsted at Actium, forgot his shame in Cleopatra's arms?
Did they quarry out that island of Antirrhodus into a nest of docks, or cover those waters with the sails of every nation under heaven?
Speak! Thou son of bats and moles--thou six feet of sand--thou mummy out of the cliff caverns! Can monks do works like these ?' 'Other men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours,' answered Philammon, trying to seem as unconcerned as he could.

He was, indeed, too utterly astonished to be angry at anything.

The overwhelming vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence of the whole scene; the range of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps, carried on her lap before or since, the extraordinary variety of form-the pure Doric and Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness of the later Roman, and here and there an imitation of the grand elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy colours relieving, while they deepened, the effect of its massive and simple outlines; the eternal repose of that great belt of stone contrasting with the restless ripple of the glittering harbour, and the busy sails which crowded out into the sea beyond, like white doves taking their flight into boundless space ?--all dazzled, overpowered, saddened him....