AT the centre of much excitement these days is an exhibition at the Naval Museum in Paris that traces the fantastic voyage of an obelisk from its original base in Egypt to the heart of the French capital.

Sculptured at the orders of Ramses II who ruled Egypt in 1300 BC, the column stood at the entrance of Luxor temple. In 1829, the Egyptian Viceroy Mehmet Ali decided to offer it as a gift to King Louis-Philippe of France.

Easier said than done! Bringing it to Paris proved to be an exploit worthy of a Hollywood action movie.

The whole operation took seven years to complete and the shipment of the obelisk, also popularly known as Cleopatra’s needle, to reach the port of Toulon on May 10, 1833 was no less than an exhausting and costly adventure.

The original project was to place the 23-metre-high, 250-tonne-heavy stone sculpture into a wooden, coffin-like container and have it towed all the way through the Nile and then across the Mediterranean by rowboats.

But the engineer Jean-Baptist Apollinaire appointed by the king as head of the operation quickly abandoned the idea as too risky.

Instead, he had the steamship Sphinx especially built to carry the haul covering a trajectory of 9,000 kilometres from Luxor to Alexandria through the Nile, then to Toulon across the Mediterranean, then to Gibraltar and northwards through the Atlantic Ocean to the English Channel, then through the river Seine back southwards to Paris.

The current exhibition provides a detailed account, including animated 3D projections, of the challenges faced during the obelisk’s ordeal, with its inevitable accidents, cholera epidemic, tempests, many attacks by sea pirates and intrigues among the crew members at various stages of the historical cruise.

To make matters worse, water levels were so low at a number of points in the Nile that there was nothing else to do but to wait and pray for rains to come.

On the appointed date of Dec 15, 1833, Paris was seized by widespread panic when the barge carrying the much-awaited monument did not appear at the expected hour on the Seine. While it was understood that the gigantic Cleopatra’s needle could not be lost in a heap of haystack, it was nevertheless a mystery to everyone.

Following rumours of acts of sabotage, the king dispatched horse soldiers along both banks of the river to track down the missing cargo.

Finally, when the gigantic column arrived in Paris on a made-to- measure vessel after a delay of six days, another controversy awaited. Where to place the monolith in the capital? Opinions were fiercely divided between spaces in front of the Louvre palace, the Bastilles, Napoleon’s tomb, the Pantheon and the Madeleine church.

Then Louis-Philippe, a very conciliatory man by nature and far from the authoritarianism of a Louis XIV or even of a Napoleon, calmly took three years to persuade the feuding dissenters that the best point for the Egyptian gift’s display would be at the Concorde square.

Concealed in the king’s suggestion was also the idea of killing two birds with one stone. To make room for the obelisk he proposed getting rid of the guillotine which still occupied a prominent spot at the Concorde as a frightful reminder of the bloody rule by revolutionaries that Louis-Philippe, like the majority of Parisians, abhorred.

But lifting the colossal object from the boat to street level, wheeling it to the centre of the Concorde, then pulling it up to stand in vertical position were operations that required some further innovations.

This was finally done, at the considerable cost of some 3.5 million Euros in today’s money, on October 25, 1836 when the obelisk was erected on a giant granite base in the presence of 200,000 enthusiastic and applauding Parisians.

In his speech the king underlined the fact that the day marked the end of revolution and bloodshed and the beginning of an era of peace that the ancient Egyptian column now symbolised. The newest addition hence became, by de facto logic, the oldest historical monument in Paris.

Tourists still flock around the pedestal on which are drawn the diagrams describing how the complex mechanisms were devised to transport the obelisk. But the exhibition at the Chaillot Palace that will last until July 6 explains this in a simpler way with modern means of communication, including an animated film.

Although Cleopatra’s needle completed its long odyssey without a scratch, thanks basically to Jean-Baptist Apollinaire’s precautionary innovations, its original gold-leaf top was missing even before the start of the journey, having been stolen in the sixth century. French experts finally added an exact copy in 1998.

—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

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