How small they appear from the long road that approaches them; did we come so far to see so little? But then they grow larger, as if they were being lifted up into the air; round a turn in the road we surprise the edge of the desert; and there suddenly the Pyramids confront us, bare and solitary in the stand, gigantic and morose against an Italian sky.[...] We stand where Caesar and Napoleon stood, and remember that fifty centuries look down upon us; where the Father of History came four hundred years before Caesar, and heard the tales that were to startle Pericles. A new perspective of time comes to us; two millenniums seem to fall out of the picture, and Caesar, Herodotus, and ourselves appear for a moment contemporary and modern before these tombs that were more ancient to them than the Greeks are to us.
p. 139, Our Oriental Heritage. From Will Durant's opening tome in his Story of Civilization series.
Beautiful teaser. I shall be adding this book to my TBR list. My TT: http://www.rundpinne.com/2010/08/teaser-tuesdays-i-curse-the-river-of-time.html
ReplyDeleteInteresting teaser. Thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteMy teaser's at http://thebookishsnob.blogspot.com
Very wordy, but still well written.
ReplyDeleteMy teaser this week is quite action packed. It's from Frostbitten by Kelly Armstrong.
I like wordy, descriptive openers. This one sounds compelling.
ReplyDeleteHere's mine:
http://rainysnowday.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/teaser-tuesdays-22/
Beautiful! But then, I like my history. Nice teaser.
ReplyDeleteIf you'd like, you can check out mine here.
lovely.
ReplyDeleteHere's mine from a funny picture book, It's a Book.