- end_line
- 5911
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5865
- text
- IV.
Pierre plunged deep into the woods, and paused not for several miles;
paused not till he came to a remarkable stone, or rather, smoothed mass
of rock, huge as a barn, which, wholly isolated horizontally, was yet
sweepingly overarched by beech-trees and chestnuts.
It was shaped something like a lengthened egg, but flattened more; and,
at the ends, pointed more; and yet not pointed, but irregularly
wedge-shaped. Somewhere near the middle of its under side, there was a
lateral ridge; and an obscure point of this ridge rested on a second
lengthwise-sharpened rock, slightly protruding from the ground. Beside
that one obscure and minute point of contact, the whole enormous and
most ponderous mass touched not another object in the wide terraqueous
world. It was a breathless thing to see. One broad haunched end hovered
within an inch of the soil, all along to the point of teetering contact;
but yet touched not the soil. Many feet from that--beneath one part of
the opposite end, which was all seamed and half-riven--the vacancy was
considerably larger, so as to make it not only possible, but convenient
to admit a crawling man; yet no mortal being had ever been known to have
the intrepid heart to crawl there.
It might well have been the wonder of all the country round. But strange
to tell, though hundreds of cottage hearthstones--where, of long
winter-evenings, both old men smoked their pipes and young men shelled
their corn--surrounded it, at no very remote distance, yet had the
youthful Pierre been the first known publishing discoverer of this
stone, which he had thereupon fancifully christened the Memnon Stone.
Possibly, the reason why this singular object had so long remained
unblazoned to the world, was not so much because it had never before
been lighted on--though indeed, both belted and topped by the dense deep
luxuriance of the aboriginal forest, it lay like Captain Kidd's sunken
hull in the gorge of the river Hudson's Highlands,--its crown being full
eight fathoms under high-foliage mark during the great spring-tide of
foliage;--and besides this, the cottagers had no special motive for
visiting its more immediate vicinity at all; their timber and fuel being
obtained from more accessible woodlands--as because, even, if any of the
simple people should have chanced to have beheld it, they, in their
hoodwinked unappreciativeness, would not have accounted it any very
marvelous sight, and therefore, would never have thought it worth their
while to publish it abroad. So that in real truth, they might have seen
it, and yet afterward have forgotten so inconsiderable a circumstance.
In short, this wondrous Memnon Stone could be no Memnon Stone to them;
nothing but a huge stumbling-block, deeply to be regretted as a vast
prospective obstacle in the way of running a handy little cross-road
through that wild part of the Manor.
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- Chunk 1