I thought how delightful it would be to make a study of the trade in marble and rare stones, tracing the course round the Mediterranean cities of the porphyry galley from the hottest quarries in the world on the Red Sea coast; a trade so active that practically no porphyry has been quarried since and all the pedestals and urns of Napoleonic bric-a-brac were made, so I am told, of stone cut in the time of Caligula. But this is the kind of thing one thinks about only when one is traveling; all the time that I am abroad I make resolutions to study one thing or another when I get back - Portuguese, map-making, photography; nothing ever comes of it. Perhaps it is a good thing to preserve one's ignorance for old age.
- Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days, pp.383-4 in Waugh Abroad
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