She sat and listened intently. Each word the man said came from his heart, she could tell. Personal experiences, personal epiphanies, revelations, from sweet moments in the garden to busy life in the streets, this man clearly had learned much across his life to give himself such an outlook on life. His overall humility and humbleness came as a surprise to the peasant girl who, in her experience, had only known the British to be a people of boasting and machismo. It was, thus, relaxing and even welcome to see one, especially one of such high status, succumbing to the powerful forces of nature and seeing himself in a much smaller light. She wanted to speak up, but had a total lack of words to say, instead reflecting on all that the lord had said to her prior to the moment, and the speech he had just delivered.
"In Egypt, there are ruins as large as any monument in London. Standing beneath them as a little girl, why, I thought the gods themselves must've built them. Geb could bring stones to the sites, and Osiris could use his mighty hands to pick them up. Horus could use his cautious and watchful eye to align the stones, and Isis could bind them all together with her magic seal, stronger than any force known to mankind. With the building complete, Set could walk all the lands of the world and tell everyone the work of the gods. It was a surreal experience to look up and see all the marvelous carvings going all up the wall. I thought to myself what wealth the pharaohs must have had, that they could have the gods themselves build their houses and their temples and their tombs.
If you've ever seen the pyramids, you will know what I mean to say. The thousands of hours of work that must've took place to build such monuments is outstanding, and they outshine any work of Christ or Muhammad. In fact, the Caliphs used Egyptian ruins to build the gilded halls of Cairo itself, a testament to the lasting strength of the ancient work that it was still seen fit for use thousands of years after it had been placed. To this day, you can look and see the last ancient wonder of the world: the Great Pyramid of Giza, standing tall against the sky, some of its outer coating still present on the pyramid, preserved from raiders and architects seeking to use its materials, and there once stood an electrum cap to the whole piece that would shine like a second sun. To even imagine how that must've looked is breathtaking, and to see the pyramid still standing four thousand years later, it dwarfs all that one can know.
And yet, once I had escaped my bondage, I became a peasant girl, more learned and experienced, but no better than I had started. I went back to see the ruins, for they were free and enjoyable, offering shade from the oppressive sun while demonstrating their own mastery. It was not this reason, though, that I visited them. I visited them to see if they were as I had remembered. If I could feel anything familiar in those ruins of old, built under the watchful gaze of great kings unlike any we might know today. I did not find familiarity, for my eyes were now open to a new view. As I stood at the foot of the ruins, examining the dust and the carvings adorning each piece of the wall, each brick decorated and painted, I noticed something.
In those ruins, I found humanity. The handprint and the name of a worker was imprinted into the wall, written into a cartouche like that of a mighty king, and yet here he was, his hand having left a crevice in the wall, one of the tens of thousands of workers that Pharaoh had employed to work on this wall. I looked over it more, and I found more signatures and stories and jokes the likes of which I should not repeat. Even their humor, with their evident overseer depicted with an elongated..." she coughed, "It was humor just like that we see today. Here I saw these great ruins, once thought to have been build by the gods themselves, and in these ruins I now knew it was not gods, but men that crafted them. With a name and a handprint, I saw in these ruins the shadow of a man long forgotten."
