Free The Voice of the Xenolith by Cynthia Pelman Page B

piece of granite is Cleopatra’s Needle, which is strangely named, because it is obviously not a needle, and it also had nothing to do with Cleopatra. It is an obelisk: a huge vertical column of rock, twenty one meters high, engraved with hieroglyphics. It now stands in London on the bank of the river Thames, close to Embankment Tube station.
    An obelisk is a tall, four-sided column, narrowing as it gets higher, and forming a pyramid shape at the top. Because I like words and I think names are important, I will tell you what this kind of monument was called by the Ancient Egyptians who created it: ‘tekhenu.’ The Ancient Greeks called them ‘obeliskos’ and our English word is derived from Greek.
    I said previously that it was relevant that my parents chose syenite for their kitchen countertop, and now I will tell you why I think that it is a kind of clue, if you are the kind of person who likes tracking and searching for information. Cleopatra’s Needle is actually not made of granite but of syenite. Most people wouldn’t know or care about this; to them granite is granite if it looks like granite. Most information you read about Cleopatra’s Needle says it is made of granite, and I thought so too, until I did some more research. But words are important, and being accurate is important, if you are a scientist.
    In Egypt today, near Aswan, you can still see an unfinished obelisk at the syenite quarry. This obelisk was apparently abandoned when a crack appeared in its surface, and it was never completed. It is still lying there, horizontal, connected to the surrounding rock. We went there on one of our desert trips with my dad, a few years ago.
    The origin of the word syenite is the ancient name for Aswan, the city in Egypt where the quarries are to be found. Aswan used to be called Swennet in ancient Egyptian and Syene in ancient Greek. That may be a completely irrelevant and boring fact for most people, but for me it is the kind of coincidence that leads me to new discoveries. I am like a detective: no information is too irrelevant, and chance discoveries can lead to you finding the answer to a problem. The fact that our countertop, which was so carefully chosen, and the obelisk at Embankment, which is my favourite piece of large rock, are both made of the same stone, is an important coincidence. Maybe all it shows is how a child’s personality and tastes can be influenced by their parents, even if they are not aware of it. Or maybe it is telling me that there is something important about that syenite obelisk in the quarry – perhaps there is a message there that I need to be able to find the meaning of.
    Maybe there is no such thing as a chance coincidence.
    Cleopatra’s Needle was carved in Egypt around 1500 BC but at some stage it fell over, with the hieroglyphic writing face down, into the dry desert sand. It was a kind of burial which preserved it, and protected the hieroglyphs from being worn away. It is in a way similar to how fossils are preserved in sandstone, or how human bodies can be preserved in peat, like the 2000-year-old ‘Lindow Man’ who was found preserved in a peat bog in Northwest England. Even though fossils and Lindow Man are preserved by completely different kinds of processes.
    This obelisk was presented to Britain in 1819 by the ruler of Egypt, but for some reason it was only brought to the UK in 1878.
    So the hieroglyphs were protected by the desert sand and climate until the obelisk came to England. Things have not been so good for it since then, because on this piece of rock you can see that even though granite is a very hard material, suitable for monuments and memorials, which need to last, it can be damaged and worn away. This is called weathering. The minerals react to acids in polluted rain, and both granite and syenite will eventually erode.
    I think it is very sad that the hieroglyphs engraved on this stone lasted for thousands of years while being preserved in the dry