The Base Of Cheops.

What was the purpose in erecting these structures? Are they simply monuments of national or royal vanity? Are they memorials of Egyptian victories or conquests? Not at all. Incredible as it may seem, they are merely the colossal sepulchres of kings - the most enormous ever reared by man. It was customary to build pyramids here as late as the time of Abraham, twenty-three hundred years before Christ; but, at a subsequent period, when the capital of the Pharaohs had been transferred from Memphis up the Nile to Thebes, rock-hewn sepulchres seem to have been preferred. Cheops is not the oldest of Egyptian pyramids. That of Sakkarah, a few miles away, probably antedates it by five hundred years. The whole region for more than forty miles is honeycombed with sepulchres, and it was all the cemetery of Memphis, - that splendid capital whose tombs have long outlived its palaces and temples.

Pyramid Of Sakkarah.

The graves in this vast necropolis, including the pyramids, are, like the tombs at Thebes, all found on the west bank of the Nile, - the side associated with those emblems of mortality, the desert and the setting sun. It is a solemn fact, therefore, that what remains to us of ancient Egypt has to do with death, not life, and was constructed with reference not to time but to eternity. The palaces and capitals of Egypt's kings have almost vanished from the earth; even their sites are often matters of conjecture; but the stupendous temples of the gods, the rock-hewn tombs, and the long line of giant sepulchres built in the form of pyramids, still survive, to emphasize the triumph of the eternal over the temporal.

The Greeks rightly said of the Egyptians, that they looked upon their earthly dwelling as a kind of inn, but upon the grave as their eternal home. In fact, they did make far more elaborate preparations for death than for life. Each of the Pharaohs, as soon as he ascended the throne, began to build his mausoleum (usually in pyramidal form), and from his neigh-boring palace in Memphis proudly watched its progress and embellishment. The pyramid of Cheops is not, therefore, as some have ingeniously argued, entirely different from the rest, - a structure built by inspiration of God, and intended to preserve for the race a perfect standard of measurement, or to prophesy by a certain number of inches the year of the world's destruction. There is no reason to doubt that it is the mausoleum of one of a long line of monarchs, all of whom erected similar, though smaller, tombs. It seems, indeed, too vast to be a casket for one human body; yet that same body, when alive, had power to order such a structure to be built, and doubtless thought it none too massive and imposing for his sepulchre.

Egyptian Funeral Ceremonies.

Pyramid Of Cheops.

The summit of Cheops affords a view unequaled in the world. Hundreds of miles to the westward stretches the vast Sahara, scattering its first golden sands at the very base of the pyramids. It is an awful sight from its dreary immensity. With its rolling waves of sand it seems a petrified ocean suddenly transformed from a state of activity into one of eternal rest. Far away, upon its yellow surface, the sunlit tents of a Bedouin encampment glisten like whitecaps on a rolling sea. In truth, this vast Sahara is an ocean - of sand. It has the same succession of limitless horizons and the same dreary monotony. Dromedaries glide over its sand waves, - true "ships of the desert," as they are called.

The Sahara.

Ships Of The Desert.

Along its sunlit surface caravans come and go like fleets of commerce. Finally, like the ocean, it is often lashed by storms which sweep it with resistless force, raising its tawny waves to blind, overwhelm, and suffocate the wretched traveler who may encounter them, until he falls, coffined only in the shroud of sand woven around him by the pitiless storm-king. On my last visit to Egypt, this solemn area of antiquity was spoiled for me in the daytime by the great crowd of travelers assembled in and about the hotel recently built almost within the shadow of the Pyramids. Serious contemplation and a true appreciation of these monuments are quite impossible in a place where one or two hundred polyglot guests are eating lunch, enlivened by the strains of Strauss' waltzes. It is the most glaring illustration of bad taste and mercenary greed that I have ever seen; and if the rest of Egypt were disfigured by such scandalous anachronisms, I should not wish ever again to set foot on its soil. Accordingly, my only satisfactory visit to the Pyramids and Sphinx, under the present condition of affairs in Egypt, was made at midnight and by moonlight. Then, with but one companion, and freed alike from crowds of noisy tourists and importunate Bedouins, and lighted only by the moon and stars, I spent four memorable hours beside these architectural mementoes of a vanished race, until the radiance of the dawn stole up the eastern sky and flushed the face of the expectant Sphinx. When standing on the summit of the Great Pyramid, if we look below us, we see what seems to be an immense, yawning grave. It is the temple of the Sphinx, partly exhumed by Mariette from the desert sands. Within it were discovered nine statues of King Cephren, the builder of the second pyramid. From this circumstance it is probable that he was its founder, and from its situation in the Necropolis of Memphis we may conclude that this shrine was used for funeral ceremonies. But now it is itself half-sepulchred in the mighty desert. Its altars are abandoned; the feet of thousands no longer tread its pavement; and if its epitaph could be traced above it in the shifting sand, it might appropriately read: "All who tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom." *