pyramids, a sufficient land-mark to guide us across the plain. As we rode on we quite realized what seems to be the common experience of all who visit them, that, instead of bulking more as they are approached, they seem rather to grow less. They looked quite as imposing when seen from the citadel of Cairo as now, when they were at a distance of only two or three miles. It is no doubt to their enormous size this result is to be ascribed. The impression one receives of their magnitude from the first far-off view is so strong, that no second look, though taken much nearer at hand, seems to add to its force. It is only, however, when we have actually reached their base, or when climbing up their mountain sides, that we get an adequate conception of their stupendous size. The entire area of my old parish, that of the Tron or St. Mary's, in the city of Glasgow, of which I was minister for many years, would do no more than afford standing ground for the pyramid of Cheops, to which we were now rapidly drawing near. Every inch of its area of twelve acres would be covered by the base of that prodigious pile.

About half-past five o'clock we had gained the outer edge of the cultivated plain, and found ourselves getting, all at once, into the desert. Between the one and the other there is a margin of debateable ground, where life and death-the Nile with its fertilizing flood, and the desert with its drought and desolation-contend with one another for the mastery, and where now the one and now the other appears to triumph.

Here there is an Arab village, whose inhabitants claim to be the guides of all who visit the pyramids. Our approach having been first signalled by the dogs, a whole troop of which came barking out to greet us, they were immediately followed by some twenty or thirty bare-legged and bare-headed Arabs, clad in their white or blue blouses, their only garment, and all eager to be employed. Though we declined their services, they followed us in a body, jabbering broken sentences of all sorts of tongues, Italian, French, German, and English, interlarded of course with abundance of Arabic. About half a mile beyond

ASCENT OF THE PYRAMIDS.

63

the village, our donkeys sinking meanwhile to the fetlocks at every step in the soft shifting sand, we came to the foot of the low limestone hills which bound the plain, and the face of which, in most places, was covered with loose sand. Dismounting from our donkeys, we advanced up the ascent, at the top of which the pyramids stand. This ascent is, so to speak, the grand substruction wall which nature has provided for these mightiest of all sepulchral monuments, affording them both a solid basis on which to rest, and so lifting them at the same time above the subjacent plain as to bring their entire mass into view.

The sun was now rapidly declining towards the west, and there was no time to be lost. The two ladies, Mr. Stevenson, and myself having resolved on the ascent, we set ourselves immediately to the somewhat arduous task of mounting the pyramid of Cheops. Whether we would or no, three or four of the Arabs attached themselves to each individual of the climbing party. The blocks of stone which form the successive courses of the huge structure are, in many cases, three feet in height-a truly formidable staircase. What with the incessant shouting of the Arabs, their wild cries, their quarrelling with one another about the possession of our persons, their clamorous entreaties for buksheesh as often as a pause was made in the ascent, and all this taking place three or four hundred feet up in the air, with only a narrow ledge of stone to stand upon, and the side of the great pyramid sloping rapidly down to the desert beneath, where those we had left at its base seemed little more than mere specks moving about on the face of the yellow sand, it would certainly have been nothing to wonder at if the ladies had felt their nerves a little shaken. To their honour be it told, however, they never flinched or faltered for a moment; and in twelve minutes from the time we left the ground we stood on the summit of the loftiest of the Egyptian pyramids, a height of 479 feet. The volatile Arabs, as much excited as if they had been drinking champagne, danced about on the narrow top of the pyramid, a

space of about twenty feet square, and shrieked like madmen by way of getting up in our honour a true English hurrah! It was only by threatening not to give them a single farthing that we at length succeeded in getting them to be quiet, and to allow us to survey and to enjoy undisturbed the singular and striking scene that lay far and wide around us.

The sun was now approaching the horizon, throwing his level rays across the broad expanse of the Libyan Desert, and sending the long shadows of the mighty pyramids far down upon the valley of the Nile. Southward the successive groups of pyra

mids we had seen at noon from the citadel of Cairo were all in view, ranged along the elevated margin of the great Nile valley, and standing solemn and awful, like gigantic sentinels, on the frontier of that vast domain of desolation and death that stretches away behind them. Eastward lay the Nile valley itself, green as an emerald, reaching from the base of the pyramids away over to the Mokattam Hills. The plain, while we were looking on it, sunk all into shadow as the sun was going down, though his latest beams were still gleaming from the domes, and minarets, and towers of the citadel of Cairo, and gilding the long range of the hills beyond it. Immediately beside us was the twin pyramid to that of Cheops, nearly of the same height, with several smaller ones grouped around. In front of them all, as if marking the grand approach from the plain below to this burying-place of the kings, stood the ponderous form of the sphinx. Colossal though it be, it looked a comparatively diminutive thing as seen from an elevation of nearly 500 feet. All round the pyramids there are numerous walled inclosures, some of them of great extent, and the general outline of which can be distinctly traced as thus seen from above. Everywhere, however, the drifting sands of the desert have succeeded in half burying these ruins. It is only the larger and loftier of them, indeed, that peer out from the sand wreaths, which, when the strong wind of the desert is abroad, sweep along like the snow-drift, and have all but covered with their arid winding-sheet these places of the dead.

A NIGHT AT THE PYRAMIDS.

65

It is in some respects more trying to come down the pyramid than to ascend it. In jumping from one step to another, if one were not held back by the Arabs, there would be some risk of gathering too much way, and going headlong to the bottom. We made the descent, however, with perfect safety; and were glad to find that, meanwhile, our Arab attendants from Cairo had pitched our tents in a sheltered hollow, selected by Mr. Brown, about half-way between the sphinx, and the pyramid of Cheops. The donkeys and their drivers were soon after very comfortably housed in one of the large adjacent tombs hewn out in the face of the rock. Our evening meal over, we sat down together at the door of one of the tents, and raised our evening song of praise. The Arabs who had been dancing and making merry in their sepulchral domicile, ceased when they heard the sound of our psalm, and, gathering around us, looked on respectfully and in seeming wonder, while "the melody of joy and health" was swelling up from beneath the deep shadows of the tombs of ancient Egypt's idolatrous kings, to give honour and praise to the one living and true God.

The sheikh of the village in the plain below had appointed a night-watch to secure us against the pilfering propensities of their neighbours; and having spread our mattresses beneath our tents upon the dry sand, we lay down to sleep. Fatigued though we were, the excitement inseparable from the events of such a day, and from the associations of the scene around us, made sleeping all but impossible. When I had begun to doze, the gentle rustling of the loose edge of the tent-curtain,—as a light air of wind kept it waving to and fro upon the surface of the desert on which we lay-made a sound so much resembling the whish, whish of the waters rushing along the sides of the ship, that more than once I fancied myself at sea. Growing weary at length of my fruitless attempts to sleep, I left the tent and walked out into the open air. The waning moon and the cloudless starry sky gave just the kind and amount of light that suited the scene. Night best accords with the place of graves.

As I strolled about amid the tombs, and looked up at the great head of the sphinx, and traced against the midnight sky the gigantic outline of the towering pyramids, it seemed to me that I drank deeper into the spirit of the place than it was possible to do in the broad light of day; and especially amid the noise and distraction of the restless and officious Arabs, who were ever at one's side. Now all was lonely and silent as death. My recollection of the pyramids, while memory lasts, will be linked with the thoughts of that midnight hour, when I wandered alone among the graves of the men whom Joseph fed, and of the generations who had cowered and trembled before that terrible rod of Moses, every movement of which brought down another and more terrible plague on their devoted land.

As the day broke, one of the Arab watchmen beside the tents began to repeat the call in which the muezzin summons the faithful Moslems to prayer-a touching and solemn usage, however erroneous and unspiritual may be the worship in which it invites the followers of the false prophet to engage. We had a long and fatiguing journey before us, and it was necessary that we should be early upon the road. While the servants were packing the baggage, we proceeded to examine the sphinx more minutely than we were able to do the night before. Both the pen and the pencil, however, have been so often employed to describe it that it needs not to tell any reader what it is like. The sand, which had been cleared away by Colonel Howard Vyse, has again swept all round the base of the image, and buried the huge leonine fore-limbs of the monstrous figure, that stretch out horizontally upon the platform of rock on which they rest like those of a lion couchant. The enormous human head and breast, set upon a lion's body, was, no doubt, meant to be the emphatic emblem of intelligence in combination with power. The royal beard that depended from the projecting chin, and the kingly crown that surmounted the massive head, have both been broken off; and as the nose has suffered a similar mutilation, the whole aspect of the figure is mis-shapen and monstrous. As we