Queen Hatshepsut has left other memorials of her greatness besides the temple with its story of her voyage. She has told us how one day she was sitting in her palace, and thinking of her Creator, when the thought came into her mind to rear two great obelisks before the Temple of Amen at Karnak. So she gave the command, and Sen-mut, her clever architect, went up the Nile to Aswan, and quarried two huge granite blocks, and floated them down the river. Cleopatra's Needle, which stands on the Thames Embankment, is 68-1/2 feet high, and it seems to us a huge stone for men to handle. Our own engineers had trouble enough in bringing it to this country, and setting it up. But these two great obelisks of Queen Hatshepsut were 98-1/2 feet high, and weighed about 350 tons apiece. Yet Sen-mut had them quarried, and set up, and carved all over from base to summit in seven months from the time when the Queen gave her command! One of them still stands at Karnak, the tallest obelisk in the temple there; while the other great shaft has fallen, and lies broken, close to its companion. They tell us their own plain story of the wisdom and skill of those far-off days; and perhaps the great Queen who thought of her Creator as she sat in her palace, and longed to honour Him, found that the God whom she ignorantly worshipped was indeed not far from His servant's heart. CHAPTER XI EGYPTIAN BOOKS The Egyptians were, if not quite the earliest, at least among the earliest of all the peoples of the world to find out how to put down their thoughts in writing, or in other words, to make a book; and one of their old books, full of wise advice from a father to his son, is, perhaps, the oldest book in the world. Two words which we are constantly using might help to remind us of how much we owe to their cleverness. The one is "Bible," and the other is "paper." When we talk of the Bible, which just means "the Book," we are using one of the words which the Greeks used to describe the plant out of which the Egyptians made the material on which they wrote; and when we talk of paper, we are using another name, the commoner name, of the same plant. For the Egyptians were the first people to make paper, and they used it for many centuries before other people had learned how much handier it was than the other things which they used.