
Ah, but which king? The monarch who had stood on these granite flagstones — scarcely worn then, eighteen hundred years ago — was probably an able and intelligent man; but he failed to conceive that the time could ever come when he would fade into an anonymity as deep as that of his humblest subjects.
Source: 1970s, The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Ch. 11 “The Silent Princess”, p. 65