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In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some
three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was
sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with
drifting sand. Behind him the desert sandwaste stretched, lifeless,
interminable, reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the
cloudless vault of blue. At his feet the sand dripped and trickled,
in yellow rivulets, from crack to crack and ledge to ledge, or
whirled past him in tiny jets of yellow smoke, before the fitful
summer airs. Here and there, upon the face of the cliffs which
walled in the opposite side of the narrow glen below, were
cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks and half-cut
pillars, standing as the workmen had left them centuries before;
the sand was slipping down and piling up around them, their heads
were frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence, desolation
- the grave of a dead nation, in a dying land.
Some of you have heard already of the old Greeks; and all of you,
as you grow up, will hear more and more of them. Those of you who
are boys will, perhaps, spend a great deal of time in reading Greek
books; and the girls, though they may not learn Greek, will be sure
to come across a great many stories taken from Greek history, and
to see, I may say every day, things which we should not have had if
it had not been for these old Greeks. You can hardly find a
well-written book which has not in it Greek names, and words, and
proverbs; you cannot walk through a great town without passing
Greek buildings; you cannot go into a well-furnished room without
seeing Greek statues and ornaments, even Greek patterns of
furniture and paper; so strangely have these old Greeks left their
mark behind them upon this modern world in which we now live.
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