As the water rose, so did the spirits of the natives. We can imagine with what joy they saw the flood break over the banks and sweep into the fields on either side. Stone pillars were put up to measure the rise. They were marked off in cubits, and the officials would watch the water stealing up and up. If it only reached 12 cubits there would be wailing throughout the land, for the people knew that famine would overtake them, that the life-giving water would not reach their fields. Another 3 cubits would suffice to feed them until the next harvest came round, if they exercised care and were not unduly wasteful, while 16 cubits, or 28 feet, would fill their granaries to overflowing, and every one would have enough and to spare. [Illustration: ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GRAND AVENUE OF SPHINXES AT KARNAK, ORIGINALLY A MILE LONG, TO REMIND US OF THE GLORIES OF EGYPT LONG AGO (_see page 71_)] They prayed long and earnestly to the Nile god, and held great festivals in his honour in a temple built in the vanished city of Nilopolis. Here they performed their rituals and made their offerings, and gave thanks to the god in years of plenty, expressing their joy and gratitude for the bounty they had received. They worshipped the Nile as the source of their blessings, just as they worshipped the sun. The sun worshippers built a magnificent temple to their god, whom they called Ra, at Heliopolis, and Cleopatra’s Needle, now standing on the Thames Embankment, is one of the two monuments which Thothmes III set up before the Temple of the Sun on the banks of the Nile. Here they remained until the legions of Augustus Cæsar defeated Cleopatra just before the dawn of the Christian era. Eight years after the dramatic death of the beautiful Egyptian queen, whom Julius Cæsar loved and Mark Antony worshipped, Augustus set his engineers and slaves to work transporting the obelisks down the Nile, to set them in front of the wonderful palace of the Cæsars built in Alexandria. The new palace of the Roman invaders grew old, decayed, and fell in ruins, but the ancient obelisks of Heliopolis still reared their pinnacles to the skies. For fifteen hundred years Cleopatra’s Needle stood firm before crashing to the ground, to lie half buried in the drifting sands for three centuries, leaving the twin obelisk standing alone. Then British soldiers, flushed with their victory over the French in Egypt in 1801, craved a memento of their triumph. Seizing on the fallen obelisk, they subscribed their hard-earned money, and sought to remove the stone to England. That weight was too much for them; it defied their efforts, so, fixing a commemorative brass plate, they left the stone lying in the sands.