In any event, unless much accustomed to climbing, you will have a realizing sense of weariness for the rest of the day, and when you attempt to rise next morning, and move your stiffened limbs, you can easily imagine yourself to be your own grandfather.

The great pyramid was built by Cheops, one of the kings of Memphis, who ruled about twenty-seven hundred years before Christ—some say nearly four thousand years—and was intended for his monument. Three hundred thousand men are said to have been employed twenty years upon its construction, and some authorities say it was not completed till after his death. When his mummy was ready, it was put inside the granite sarcophagus intended for it, and the entrance was carefully walled up and concealed. It remained thus closed for many centuries. In the year 820 of our era, one of the Caliphs of Cairo ordered a search for the opening, and it was finally discovered at quite a distance up from the ground on one side. Nothing of consequence was found there, and the Caliph was greatly disappointed, as he had expected a vast treasure which tradition said was concealed there.

It is quite as wearisome work to go inside as to climb to the top, and many persons think it is worse.

From the opening, you descend about sixty feet, at an angle of 26°, through a passage way three ft. five in. high, and three ft. eleven in. wide. Then, after a slight detour, you have an ascent at the same angle for nearly three hundred feet, some parts of it being quite low, and others expanding into a high gallery. At the end of this passage is the sepulchral vault known as the King’s Chamber, and containing nothing but an empty sarcophagus of red granite. The sides and roof of the chamber are of polished granite; the room measures thirty-four ft. by seventeen, and the height is a little over nineteen feet.

The passage by which we enter the pyramid continues three hundred and twenty feet downwards, at the same angle as at the commencement, and so straight is it that when you are at the lower end you can see the sky as if looking through the tube of a huge telescope. At the end of it there is a small chamber, and in this a well has been dug thirty-six feet, without finding any signs of water. The statement of Herodotus, that this chamber was filled by the inflow from the Nile, is probably on a par with other statements of this reliable gentleman.

Most travellers are satisfied with a very brief examination of the interior of the pyramid, and are glad to scramble out without delay. The heat is pretty high, the air is close, and the dust almost stifling. Then there are the smoke of the candles and the glare of the magnesium wire, used for lighting up the interior of the chambers, and the noise made by the Arabs, which is ten times worse than the same amount of din in the open air.

Formerly, they had a trick of frightening timid persons into the payment of heavy “backsheesh,” to secure a safe return to the outside, and not unfrequently they attempt the same thing now. Some persons have been very roughly handled by them, and on a few occasions they have verified the American proverb about waking up the wrong passenger.

Early this season, an Englishman and an American went together to visit the pyramid, and, while they were inside, the Arabs began to threaten them. One Arab was knocked senseless, and the others were told that they would have the same fate, if they did not instantly and safely take the strangers outside.

They obeyed, and when the outer air was reached were told that they would not receive anything for their services.

Originally, it had a cap, wig, and beard; the cap is gone, but the wig is still there, and the beard, which has fallen, lies on the ground below. As it now stands, only the head, shoulders, and back of the Sphinx are visible, the sand being everywhere drifted and piled around the rest. There was, originally, a temple and altar between its paws, and there was a flight of steps that descended from a platform in front of the temple to the plain below.

The nose and most of the lips are gone, as though the Sphinx has been the party of the second part, in a prize-fight for the championship, but, with all its disfiguration, the statue retains much of the comeliness and grandeur for which it has long been famous.

Its history is unknown, but, from certain inscriptions and statues found there, it is supposed to owe its erection to Cephrenes, or Shafra, the builder of the second pyramid.

The Arabs broke off pieces of the stone to sell to us, but we declined to buy. Part of a statue lies buried in the sand; a statue of Cephrenes was discovered here, and is now in the museum at Cairo. There are many tombs and small temples all around the pyramids, but they have no great, interest after one has seen the great pyramid and the Sphinx. All the tombs, as far as known, have been opened and examined, and their contents, if of any value, carried away. Doubtless there are some yet undiscovered, but at present there are no explorations in progress.

With the steamboat trip you have no trouble at all; you have only to buy your ticket, and go on board at the appointed time; you are fed, lodged, furnished with guides and donkeys, told when to admire, and how much you can admire, and have a given number of days, hours, and minutes in which to do everything. If no accident happens, you will be back in Cairo twenty days and five hours from the time of your departure, and will have been put through the Nile trip, as though you were a trunk or a bale of goods. You have a printed programme of the places to be visited, and of the time to be devoted to each, and also of the sights at each of those places. You are instructed not to stray from the party, but to follow the dragoman and observe the orders he gives.

There is in London a man, named Cook, who has been for a quarter of a century or more a dealer in excursion tickets for England and the Continent. A few years ago he extended his excursion business to the East, and latterly he has extended it to America, and around the globe. He has a rival named Gaze, and they are very savage on each other. Gaze says (in polite phraseology) that Cook is a liar, and Cook (in equally polite phraseology) says Gaze is a liar.

I have read both their pamphlets, and have come to the conclusion, when perusing their personal anathemas, that they both tell the truth.

To ascend by sail-boat to the First Cataract, and return to Cairo, will cost two persons about fifteen hundred dollars, and four persons about two thousand dollars. To go to the Second Cataract will cost about five hundred more in each case. If the party is larger, the charge is somewhat lower for each person. For these figures one can get a large, well-fitted boat, and be entitled to live with every possible comfort; lower rates can be made for smaller boats, and less luxury; the best terms I heard of when I was in Egypt, were sixty-five Napoleons (two hundred and sixty dollars gold) each for a party of five to the First Cataract, and allowing them fourteen days for stoppages on the return trip. I was several times offered a contract at seventy or eighty Napoleons each, for a party of five or six to the First Cataract, and for a hundred Napoleons each, to the Second. But this was late in the season (early in January), in fact too late to have a reasonable chance of reaching the Second Cataract. To go there, one should start in the latter part of November, or early in December, and for the First Cataract one should start in December. Early in the season the prices are high; later on they are more reasonable, as the dragomen and owners of boats begin to be doubtful of securing an engagement.

We were a party of thirty persons altogether, and included six nationalities,—American, English, French, German, Danish, and Italian.

Every place on the boat was occupied, and there might have been a dozen more, had there been any place to put them in. The boats leave every two weeks from the first of December to the end of March, and if at any time there are passengers enough to fill an extra boat, one is sent off.

Three o’clock was the hour for starting, so we left the hotel at two, sending our luggage on a charette, and taking donkeys, (for ourselves,) to the landing.

Gustave and I thought we would get ahead of Mr. Cook a little, by taking our own wine along, as the wines on the boat were extra, and sold at a very high price, and we found that we would save about fifty per cent, by taking wine from the shop, and paying Cook a shilling a bottle, the advertised price for corkage. So we bought three cases and put them with our baggage, but they were stopped on the deck of the steamer, by the Chief Steward of the line, who said he would examine the wine, fix a price upon it, and then charge us fifty per cent, on its value. We had about five minutes of very lively talk, which ended in our triumph, as we had taken care to bring a copy of the advertisement, with the proper paragraph ready marked for inspection.

The human form divine, without superfluous adornment or encumbrance, is a frequent object in an Egyptian landscape. A student of living figures, a la nature, would here find a good field for his observations.

We had not been ten minutes under way before there was an alarm of fire, and the boat was stopped. It was nothing very serious, only the awning over the upper deck had taken fire from a spark from the chimney, and a hole about six inches across was burned in the canvas. A little while afterward we went aground, but we did not stick there long; half an hour later there was something wrong about the engine, and we had to run to the shore. None of these things wasted much time, but they didn’t promise well for the future. Luckily, however, they were the only events of the kind in the voyage, except that we went aground occasionally, and the bad beginning proved like many other similar affairs in life, a good ending.

We stopped for the night at Badresheyn, a village about fifteen miles above Cairo; we were to lie there until daylight, as these steamers do not run at night. From this point passengers on the dahabeeahs generally make an excursion to the site of Memphis, and to the Apis Mausoleum.

As for Memphis there is very little of it. A half buried statue lying on its face is shown you, and there are a few substructions and some heaps of ruins. There are some statues and statuettes in the Museum at Cairo, that were discovered at Memphis, and i the sites of two temples have been traced. I went to Memphis with a party early in January, and at that time the water was so high that most of the famous statue was invisible. This statue was originally about fifty feet high, and hewn from a single block of limestone; it stood in front of a temple and is supposed to be the one mentioned by Herodotus. Memphis was used as a quarry for supplying stone for the construction of Cairo, and hence the disappearance of the ancient city.

Mariette took this as a clue and went to work. The labor was most discouraging as the sand kept falling in almost as fast as it was taken out. An avenue six hundred feet long was cleared out, and sometimes it was necessary to dig the trench sixty or seventy feet deep. A hundred and fifty sphinxes were discovered, besides the pedestals of many others. The foundations of the temple were discovered and laid bare; many statues were found, and at last in 1861 the Apis Mausoleum or Burial place of the Sacred Bulls was opened. The avenue and the foundations of the temple are again covered with sand, and so is a portion of the Mausoleum, but the most interesting part is still kept open.

We left our donkeys at the house where M. Mariette lived during the excavation, and accompanied an Arab guide to the tomb. Entering through a door and descending some steps, we were in the vaults, which consist of parallel galleries, each more than two hundred yards long and united at the ends. The galleries are hewn out of the solid rock, and were evidently cut with great care, but there is nothing very remarkable about them. The wonderful feature of the place is the stone coffins in which the sacred bulls were buried. There are twenty-four of them in recesses, on the sides of the galleries, but never opposite each other, and they are about the heaviest things in the coffin line that anybody has ever seen. They vary a little in size, but the average may be taken at thirteen feet long, seven feet six inches wide, and eleven feet high.

Now stop and think before you go on; stop and think how large a room it would take to hold one of these coffins; well, each coffin is one solid piece of granite, from the quarries at Assouan, five hundred and eighty miles up the Nile, and is finished as nicely as you ever saw anything in the granite line. Four or five persons can sit comfortably inside, and one of them contains the

The Egyptians knew some things that we don’t. We can’t move these stone coffins; they moved them along the Nile nearly six hundred miles, and from the East to the West bank, and put them in these galleries underground and exactly in the recesses where they wanted them, and they used them as the burial places of the sacred bulls of Memphis; the bulls that they worshipped as the incarnation of divinity.

All the region around here was a burial place, and many excavations have been made among the tombs. Thousands of mummies have been found, and doubtless thousands more might be discovered if further researches were made. It is four thousand years since some of these mummied gentlemen were pickled and preserved, and they have kept well; you may find them to-day as fresh as when they were planted, and they reflect creditably upon the mummy-sharps that put them up, and also upon the wonderfully dry climate of Egypt. I half suspect that the climate is responsible for the religious faith of the ancient Egyptians, and particularly for that part of it which bade them bestow so much care upon their tombs and the preservation of the body.

Had their climate been like that of London or New York, they would have constructed a different religion, as they would have known they could not successfully carry out the mummy part of it.

There is one picture which shows some donkeys, brought up to be laden, and they are raising their heels in a miscellaneous sort of a way, and making things rather lively for those who are trying to control them. In another picture, where some men are fishing, one has fallen from the boat, and his friends are pulling him out of the mud. In another, a man has evidently been pulling at a rope, which has broken, and left him to fall in an attitude which is decidedly comical.

Evidently Tih was no slouch. He got up his tomb regardless of expense, and made it the best of the kind. The Egyptians often spent more money on their tombs than on their houses; they considered that they were only temporary occupants of their houses, but that the tomb was to be their eternal dwelling place. The tomb was the real home, and hence the effort to surround the occupant with the scenes he had witnessed on earth.

Some of the archaeologists say that the bricks of which this pyramid is composed were made by the Israelites, during their captivity. I shouldn’t be surprised if this was the case. I certainly don’t know that the bricks were not made by them.

These boats, when laden, were sunk rather deeply, and boards were placed along the sides to prevent the water breaking over. The “Doubter” was puzzled to know why they always put these boards at the sides of the boats. The Professor (this was the name we sometimes gave to Gustave) came to his relief with the following explanation:

“The Nile rises every year, and they put these boards up while the river is high to prevent the water coming into the boats, just as they build up the banks to keep the fields from being drowned out.”

The “Doubter” was satisfied for a moment, but only for a moment.

“But will the boats float on the water, whether the river is high or low,” he asked, “and if they do, what is the use of the side-boards at one time more than another?”

The Professor was equal to the emergency, and explained that the rise of the river was so rapid, and the boats were so slow in their motion, that the flood frequently overtook and swamped them. There was no further conversation on this topic.

In the afternoon we reached Beni-Soef, and took a stroll through the town, which has a population of about five thousand, and can boast of a fairly-stocked bazaar. We saw nothing of importance in our walk that we had not already seen at Cairo. I strayed from the party and hired a boy to direct me to the post-office, where I posted a letter for America. The place was closed, but luckily I had the proper stamps on the letter, so that there was nothing to do beyond dropping the missive into the box.

The Egyptian postal department is quite well managed; the postmaster general is an Italian, and the most of his employés are of his nationality. The office at Cairo is in a large building, specially erected for it, and you have no trouble in finding the delivery windows and in obtaining the proper stamps, when you want them. They pay great attention to the delivery of letters to foreigners, and a placard in all the hotels informs persons about to ascend the Nile, that by leaving their addresses at the office, they can have their mail matter forwarded to any point on, the river they may designate. The steamboats carry letters to parties on dahabeeahs, and several times the boat was stopped to deliver such parcels.

The pyramid of Meidoon in this vicinity is supposed to be older than any of the pyramids of Gizeh, as it was probably erected by the predecessor of Cheops. All around it are tombs, and some of them have been explored with the most gratifying results. In one of them two stone statues, in perfect preservation, were found in 1872, and are now in the Museum at Cairo.

They belong to the Hid Dynasty, and are consequently more than six thousand years old. The work on them is admirable, and they are evidently likenesses, and excellent ones too. The eyes are made of crystal, with a piece of black porphyry for the pupils, and this combination gives them a remarkably life-like

“You should see them late in the afternoon, when the slanting rays of light fall upon them; they sometimes look as if ready to step out and speak, and seem much more human than inanimate.”

The art of sculpture has not advanced as much as many persons imagine.

There is in the museum another statue of about the same age, but it is made of wood; it represents a man standing erect, and is about half the natural size, and as life-like as any piece of work that ever issued from a Greek or Roman studio. Its eyes are inserted within a closing covering of bronze, which serves for the lids; the eye itself consists of opaque, white quartz, with a piece of rock crystal in the centre, as a pupil; there is a glittering point beneath this crystal, so that the resemblance to life is almost perfect. The head and body are remarkably well executed, and evidently the figure is a good likeness of the person represented, who was not a king, or a divinity, but simply a sheik-el-beled, or village chief. The statue was complete when found, with the exception of the feet, which have been supplied, to enable the figure to be placed on a pedestal. Originally, the statue was covered with a slight coating of stucco, painted red and white, but this is nearly gone now.

On a bluff, on the east bank of the river, there is a Coptic convent, many of whose inmates are accustomed to visit passing boats, and beg for “backsheesh.” We had a visit from them; the first that was known of their coming was by a rush of two or three passengers to the after part of the steamer. They were followed by all the others then on deck, and the cause of the movement was seen in the small boats, which we towed astern.

A tall, muscular fellow, perfectly nude, was standing there and gesticulating to the passengers with the explanation, “backsheesh, howadji; ana Chritiané” (“a present, gentlemen, I am a Christian.”)

These men swim, not after the Occidental manner, but with a hand-over-hand motion, analagous to the swimming of a dog. When a man wanted to board the steamer, he took a position near her supposed track, so that when she passed him the wheels were not more than a yard from his head. The instant the wheel had gone by, he struck out most vigorously towards the stern of the steamer, and by great effort was able to climb into the small boat, towing behind us. Formerly they came on the steamer itself, and rendered it necessary for the ladies to retreat to the cabins, but at present they can come no further than the small boats.

The Copts are supposed to be the descendants of the ancient Egyptians, but they have become so mixed with the Arabs and others, that it is hard to say what they are. They form about one-sixteenth of the population, and the most of them are Christians; the name is generally applied only to the Christian natives, but there are many Copts who are Mohammedans.

Their ancient language is almost lost; it is used in the churches for reading the prayers, in the same way that the Catholics use Latin, and the Russians the Slavonic. Their language in daily life is the Egyptian Arabic of the rest of the country; as a rule, they are better educated than the rest of the people, and are extensively employed as clerks and bookkeepers, not only in shops, but in various government offices. They have a cleaner and better kept appearance on the whole than the Moslem Arabs, and some of them are such great rascals, and show so much skill in swindling, as to indicate considerable familiarity with the principles of civilization.

We passed in this part of the river a great many sugar-mills, most of them in full operation, as it was then the proper season of the cane-harvest. The boat stopped at Minieh long enough to allow us to visit one of these mills.