356' COFFEE. • 



visits Egypt does that. Before I came here I never kiiew that 

 there were more than three, but standing on the summit of the 

 Pvramid of Cheops one can count a dozen or more, many of them 

 of large size. Indeed, according to the best authorities, most of 

 the principal rulers of ancient Egypt built a Pyramid to com- 

 memorate his reign, and receive his remains. The three Pyra- 

 mids of Ghizeh, however, are the largest and most celebrated. 

 They are situated in the desert, just on the border of the fertile 

 lowlands of the Nile, some eight or ten miles from Cairo; the 

 Pyramid of Cheops is the largest of the three ; it is 445 feet high 

 (formerly 479), and 767 feet square at the base, each of the four 

 angles corresponding to the four points of the compass. They 

 are composed of blocks of rather soft, somewhat chalky limestone, 

 upon an average, perhaps, five or six feet long and three to four 

 feet square ; these are arranged in layers, each layer set back 

 from the face of the one below it some three feet, and thus re- 

 treating, if I may use the phrase, in regular progression until 

 they finally reach a point ' at the top — a solid, pyramidal mass of 

 stone, containing so many tons that it almost defies arithmetical 

 calculation to compute them ; a mass so durable that they have 

 stood here, according to the best authorities, some four thousand 

 years, looking down upon the rise and fall of dynasties and em- 

 pires, and indeed, witnessing the total wiping out of one of the 

 greatest nations that ever existed, so thoroughly that its civiliza- 

 tion and characteristics are still shrouded in mystery, and in many 

 cases exist only in the conjectures of the learned men of the pres- 

 ent day. 



The point or apex is some twenty-five feet square, although 

 the magnitude of the structure is such that, looking at it from the 

 bottom, it appears to run up to a point, which chroniclers say it 

 formerly did. Standing upon the summit, one gazes off upon the 

 sand-hills of the desert on the one side, and the fertile valley of 

 the Nile on the other, covered in January with a beautiful velvety 

 green sward, across which, at a distance of ten miles, gleam the 

 white walls of the mosques and minarets of Cairo. Here Napo- 

 leon Bonaparte addressed his troops on the eve of the battle of 

 the PjTamids, telling them that forty centuries looked down upon 

 their deeds that day, and from the summit he watched the tide 



