She was wearing a great, golden something over her shoulders - a perfect complement to that monumental face, which is certainly one of the marvels of the world.
It is a monumental face now, so puckered and pleated that it no longer looks merely weathered, as it has for decades, but seems closer to petrified wood.
You experience it overwhelmingly in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, where his scenes tell the stories of the Virgin and Christ with marvellously explicit medieval gestures, peasant bodies, ordinary yet monumental faces.
I'm adding Javier Marías's monumental Your Face Tomorrow, and a book which is in many ways its exact opposite, Maria Barbal's flinty fragment, Stone in a Landslide.
His 12th novel, The Infatuations, is published in English next month, and work such as All Souls, A Heart So White, and, more recently, his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, have received almost universal critical acclaim.
What really mattered, he said, was the passion and faith Modi was bringing to the monumental challenges facing India.
The title "Higher Ground" comes from the places communities flock to escape rising flood waters and is a metaphor for the monumental problems facing the area — drug abuse, strip mining, dwindling populations of young people.
Gen. Petraeus said little about his plans at the helm of the C.I.A., stressing only that the battle against terrorism must not distract the United States and its allies from other monumental challenges facing Western countries, like the emergence of China as a political and economic heavyweight.
The investigation was another reminder, as if he needed it, of the monumental challenges facing Mr. Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor who is overseeing the consolidation of 22 agencies into his department, which is responsible for preventing terrorist attacks on American soil.
As David Cameron prepares to issue a warning in Scotland that a vote for independence will lead to a permanent split from the UK, campaigners for the union welcomed the Queen's remarks as a reminder of the monumental decision facing voters in Scotland.
What are the truly monumental problems facing our society and how do we fix them?
