178 The Great Pyramid in+Egypt. [April, 



standing on in the Great Pyramid case, and through no 

 superior innate virtue of our own. 



All this may haply form but a dull occupation to many 

 minds ; yet is it a positive duty to be performed. And if I 

 spent five months in carrying it out to the best of my 

 ability in Egypt, my readers will hardly complain if five 

 minutes of their time be now occupied in hearing little more 

 than details of numerical measures. Fully convinced, too, as 

 they should be in their own minds, that such work is an abso- 

 lutely necessary Red Sea of difficulty, toil, and trouble which 

 all must wade through if they would fain reach eventually the 

 promised land of sound theory, and thence behold some 

 glorious rays of primeval truth concerning man, and even 

 haply ascertain why these early things which we behold were 

 so made and fashioned. 



2. Of the Things to be Observed. 



After the traveller has enjoyed his first and very distant 

 view of the Pyramids of Jeezeh, from the deck of his Nile 

 boat, or in modern times from the window of a railway 

 carriage, as both the one and the other conveyance are nearing 

 Cairo, and are passing a particular neck of flat, open land, 

 just where the grand African river, which has rolled its 

 floods from the South through so many thousands of miles 

 of a single continuous channel, suddenly parts them into a 

 fan-like form of many branches, producing thereby the 

 Delta shaped land of Lower Egypt; the said traveller, I say, 

 is rather bewildered than enlightened, and astounded more 

 with confusion than sublimity when he afterwards of set 

 purpose reaches the pyramids themselves, and actually 

 treads the ground on which they stand. 



In the distant view, both the great and the second great, 

 and sometimes even the third great pyramid, stand up sharp 

 and clear on the horizon line, with their triangular sides 

 glittering towards the sun like the facets of a regular crystal, 

 and you could then fancy any amount of refinement and 

 finish of their surface; while the country between shows you 

 only calm reaches of blue water, and wide expanses of 

 greenest corn-land, with the occasional waving fronds of a 

 gracious palm-tree, crowning a village knoll or adorning a 

 garden grove in the nearer distance that intervenes. 



But, on reaching the very pyramids by the usual road 

 from Cairo, you have already turned your back on every- 

 thing that is green throughout all the land of Egypt ; the 

 silent, and white and yellow desert is about you on every 

 side; and those stupendous monuments of early man seem, if 



