Mr. Gorringe is shaking hands with a bunch of big shots, and now he’s going down to talk to the workmen. At least ten of them are gathered around him. A hush has fallen over the crowd.
I count seven small hydraulic jacks attached to the bottom of Cleopatra’s Needle. Mr. Gorringe gave the word, and they pushed Cleopatra’s Needle up a few feet off the trestle! It looks like it’s suspended in the air.
Now they’re clamping Cleopatra’s Needle to the turning mechanism. Mr. Gorringe is walking around to look at it from all sides and make sure it’s clamped on tightly.
I found this sheet music on the ground.
It’s almost noon. That’s when the newspapers said Cleopatra’s Needle would be turned vertical.
Two groups of workmen are grabbing the cables on either side of Cleopatra’s Needle. Five in the front and five in the back.
Everybody’s looking at Mr. Gorringe. Diary, I am going to have to stop writing. I don’t want to miss anything!
The big moment.
Mr. Gorringe just put his hand up in the air.
He’s holding a handkerchief.
The workmen are pulling on the cables.
It’s totally silent except for the workmen grunting! I’m holding my breath.
The pointy end of the Needle is starting to lift up! The bottom end is swinging down!
It’s turning! It’s turning! I can’t believe five men pulling on ropes can turn something that weighs over two hundred tons!
It’s at a 45-degree angle! It’s unbelievable!
Cleopatra’s Needle is standing up, straight and tall!
We all broke out in cheers. Everybody is shaking hands and hugging. The Marine band is playing. Annie said that Cleopatra’s Needle is so high, it looks like it’s scraping against the sky. I said it must be a skyscraper.
I can’t believe it took over a year to get Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to America. And then it took just five minutes to turn it vertical. It’s amazing!
Some men just ran over and placed big bronze sculptures of crabs at the four corners of the pedestal. I guess that will give it extra support.
Oh, they’re peeling off the wooden casing now! It’s about time. As they take off each board and toss it to the ground, I can see more and more of Cleopatra’s Needle. Oh, it is a beautiful thing.
There are interesting symbols called hieroglyphs that are carved into the sides of the obelisk. The newspapers have been talking about them for weeks. They say the symbols are secret messages from the ancient Egyptians. I don’t know about that. But the hieroglyphs do make Cleopatra’s Needle even more interesting to look at.
I can hardly believe I was lucky enough to witness this amazing event. Someday, when I grow up and have children of my own, I’m going to bring them here to see this and tell them how I watched Mr. Henry Honychurch Gorringe bring Cleopatra’s Needle to Central Park. And maybe someday, they’ll bring their children and grandchildren too.
Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park today.
Meanwhile, in the present day...
“Well, that’s the whole story,” Mom said as she got up from the bench. “If we hurry, I think we can be home in time for dinner—”
“Wait a minute!” I shouted. “Did you just say ‘they’ll bring their children’? Does that mean that the girl who wrote the last diary was...”
“My great-grandmother,” my mom said. “Your great-great grandmother.”
My mind was blown.
“Why didn’t you tell me from the start that your great-grandmother was here when they brought Cleopatra’s Needle to America?”
“You didn’t seem all that interested,” Mom replied. “And I didn’t want to bore you. You said you wanted to go home and watch a ball game on TV.”
“But now I want to know what happened next!” I whined. “What was in the secret box that guy stashed under Cleopatra’s Needle? Is it still there? What happened to the Dessoug? What happened after the obelisk got here?”
“You ask too many questions,” Mom said as we left Central Park. “Maybe we’ll come back another time and I’ll tell you about all those things.”
Well, I didn’t want to wait to get the rest of the story. I wanted to find out what happened right away. So I looked it up for myself. Isn’t that why they invented the internet?
So here’s what I found out:
•In 1881, the summer after Cleopatra’s Needle was raised in Central Park, the mummy of Thutmosis III was found in a secret burial chamber in a cave high up on a cliff in Egypt. Mummies of forty other pharaohs and royals were found there too, and they were put into Egyptian museums. So the same year Cleopatra’s Needle found a new home, so did the pharaoh who was responsible for making it.
And in 1922, King Tut’s tomb was finally found.
•After delivering Cleopatra’s Needle to New York City, the Dessoug was used for shipping cotton and coal between New York and Savannah, Georgia. When I searched online, some sources said its propeller broke in the 1890s and the ship was turned into scrap metal. Other sources said it was lost at sea. Nobody seems to know for sure what happened to it. It may be underwater somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean today.
