Early in July, 1877, he arrived at Alexandria, and soon unearthed the buried monolith, which he was delighted to find in much better condition than had been generally represented. With considerable labour it was encased in an iron watertight cylinder about one hundred feet long, which with its precious treasure was set afloat. The _Olga_ steam tug was employed to tow it, and on the 21st September, 1877, steamed out of the harbour of Alexandria _en route_ for England. The voyage for twenty days was a prosperous one, but on the 14th October, when in the Bay of Biscay, a storm arose, and the pontoon cylinder was raised on end. At midnight it was thought to be foundering, and to save the crew its connection with the _Olga_ was cut off. The captain, thinking that the Needle had gone to the bottom of the sea, sailed for England, where the sorrowful tidings soon spread of the loss of the anxiously expected monument. To the great delight of the nation, it was discovered that the pontoon, instead of sinking, had floated about for sixty hours on the surface of the waters, and having been picked up by the steamer _Fitzmaurice_, had been towed to Vigo, on the coast of Spain. After a few weeks' delay it was brought to England, and set up in its present position on the Thames Embankment. The London Needle is about seventy feet long, and from the base, which measures about eight feet, it gradually tapers upwards to the width of five feet, when it contracts into a pointed pyramid seven feet high. Set up in its original position at Heliopolis about fifteen centuries before the Christian era, this venerable monument of a remote antiquity is nearly thirty-five centuries old. "Such is the British Obelisk, unique, grand, and symbolical, which devotion reared upward to the sun ere many empires of the West had emerged from obscurity. It was ancient at the foundation of the city of Rome, and even old when the Greek empire was in its cradle. Its history is lost in the clouds of mythology long before the rise of the Roman power. To Solomon's Egyptian bride the Needle must have been an ancestral monument; to Pythagoras and Solon a record of a traditional past antecedent to all historical recollection. In the college near the obelisk, Moses, the meekest of all men, learned the wisdom of the Egyptians. When, after the terrible last plague, the mixed multitude of the Israelites were driven forth from Egypt, the light of the pillar of fire threw the shadow of the obelisk across the path of the fugitives. Centuries later, when the wrecked empire of Judæa was dispersed by the king of Babylon, it was again in the precincts of the obelisk of On that the exiled people of the Lord took shelter. Upon how many scenes has that monolith looked!" Amid the changes of many dynasties and the fall of mighty empires it is still preserved to posterity, and now rises in our midst--the most venerable and the most valuable relic of the infancy of the world.