264 DR. HOOKER’S MISSION TO INDIA. 
yellow haze which overhangs the sand-hills of the vast Lybian 
Desert. 
I took a few sketches of these scenes, the grandest, perhaps, 
but certainly the least attractive I had ever viewed; and after 
collecting all the Lichens I could find on the stones near the sum- 
mit (where alone they grow), I descended, and made arrangements 
for visiting the interior. There I was highly interested. Though 
hurried by two Arabs along the slippery inclined passage, choking 
with heat and dust and crouching on hands and knees, I perfectly 
remembered every passage and chamber, every ascent and descent. 
The intense interest, with which I had read, when a boy, the 
history of the entrance and exploration of this Pyramid, was 
vividly recalled to my mind; and I astonished my companion by 
telling him when we were approaching a well, a chamber, the ascent 
or descent, &c.. The incomprehensible form of the avenue which 
leads to the upper or King’s Chamber, which is many times higher 
than broad, and its sides, above, terraced outwards, as it were, 
with slabs of polished granite ; the polished canal, along which the 
Sarcophagus was dragged; and the Sarcophagus itself,—all were 
familiar to my mind; even to the polished granite stones of the 
chamber, and their dimensions, each seventeen feet long by three 
and three-quarters wide. The inside of the Pyramid was to 
me incomparably more striking than the exterior; perhaps only 
because it had afforded to my memory a most happy occasion of 
rejoicing in its exercise, and because our earliest reading is Te 
tained the best. 1 
There is one grievous disappointment in the Pyramids, and 
it is increased by visiting them ;—I mean their utter futility. 
It is now, I believe, proved that they are simply the mausolea 
of individuals. When I was a child, I was used to regard them 
as having been constructed for a triple object (any one 
which were better than the commemoration of a mere mortal), 
namely, as astronomical buildings, as places of worship, and 
as edifices dedicated to the Genius of the Nile, whose waters 
brought fertility to their bases. If any of these ideas had been 
correct, the Pyramids might, when more understood, have thrown d 
