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The cairn

Chapter 316: Pyramids.
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About This Book

A compact miscellany of short essays, anecdotes, prayers, poems, and biographical sketches that collects reflections on grief, maternal love, benevolence, virtue, taste, and historical episodes. The pieces alternate personal memories, moral aphorisms, humorous and touching anecdotes, and brief portraits of public figures, often framed as letters, epitaphs, or short narratives. Recurring themes include the effects of sorrow and joy, domestic affection, charity, the vicissitudes of fortune, and the consolations of faith and art. The tone moves between intimate recollection and light moralizing, presenting varied, self-contained vignettes meant to instruct, console, and amuse.

Pyramids.

The greatest of the three, and chief of the world’s seven wonders, is west of Cairo. It takes up eight acres of ground, every square being 300 paces in length, and the square of the top consisting of three stones only, yet large enough for threescore people to stand upon; ascended by two hundred and fifty-five steps, each step above three feet high, and of a breadth proportionable. No stone so little throughout the whole as to be drawn by our carriages; yet were these hewn out of the Trojan mountains, far off in Arabia: a wonder how conveyed thither, and how so mounted a greater. Twenty years it was building; by three hundred three score and six thousand men continually wrought upon, who, only in radishes, garlick, and onions, are said to have consumed one thousand and eight hundred talents.