University of Virginia Library

58. CHAPTER LVIII.

THE donkeys were all good, all handsome, all strong and in
good condition, all fast and all willing to prove it. They
were the best we had found any where, and the most recherche.
I do not know what recherche is, but that is what these donkeys
were, anyhow. Some were of a soft mouse-color, and the
others were white, black, and vari-colored. Some were close-shaven,
all over, except that a tuft like a paint-brush was left
on the end of the tail. Others were so shaven in fanciful landscape
garden patterns, as to mark their bodies with curving
lines, which were bounded on one side by hair and on the other
by the close plush left by the shears. They had all been newly
barbered, and were exceedingly stylish. Several of the white
ones were barred like zebras with rainbow stripes of blue and
red and yellow paint. These were indescribably gorgeous. Dan
and Jack selected from this lot because they brought back Italian
reminiscences of the “old masters.” The saddles were the
high, stuffy, frog-shaped things we had known in Ephesus and
Smyrna. The donkey-boys were lively young Egyptian rascals
who could follow a donkey and keep him in a canter half
a day without tiring. We had plenty of spectators when we
mounted, for the hotel was full of English people bound overland
to India and officers getting ready for the African campaign
against the Abyssinian King Theodorus. We were not
a very large party, but as we charged through the streets of the
great metropolis, we made noise for five hundred, and displayed
activity and created excitement in proportion. Nobody
can steer a donkey, and some collided with camels, dervishes,

effendis, asses, beggars and every thing else that offered to the
donkeys a reasonable chance for a collision. When we turned
into the broad avenue that leads out of the city toward Old
Cairo, there was plenty of room. The walls of stately datepalms
that fenced the gardens and bordered the way, threw
their shadows down and made the air cool and bracing. We
rose to the spirit of the time and the race became a wild rout, a
stampede, a terrific panic. I wish to live to enjoy it again.

Somewhere along this route we had a few startling exhibitions
of Oriental simplicity. A girl apparently thirteen years
of age came along the great thoroughfare dressed like Eve before
the fall. We would have called her thirteen at home;
but here girls who look thirteen are often not more than
nine, in reality. Occasionally we saw stark-naked men of superb
build, bathing, and making no attempt at concealment.
However, an hour's acquaintance with this cheerful custom
reconciled the pilgrims to it, and then it ceased to occasion
remark. Thus easily do even the most startling novelties grow
tame and spiritless to these sight-surfeited wanderers.

Arrived at Old Cairo, the camp-followers took up the donkeys
and tumbled them bodily aboard a small boat with a lateen
sail, and we followed and got under way. The deck was
closely packed with donkeys and men; the two sailors had to
climb over and under and through the wedged mass to work
the sails, and the steersman had to crowd four or five donkeys
out of the way when he wished to swing his tiller and put his
helm hard-down. But what were their troubles to us? We
had nothing to do; nothing to do but enjoy the trip; nothing
to do but shove the donkeys off our corns and look at the charming
scenery of the Nile.

On the island at our right was the machine they call the Nilometer,
a stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of
the river and prophecy whether it will reach only thirty-two
feet and produce a famine, or whether it will properly flood
the land at forty and produce plenty, or whether it will rise
to forty-three and bring death and destruction to flocks and
crops—but how it does all this they could not explain to us so

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 620. In-line Illustration. Image of a cross-section of a building built over a river. The caption reads, "NILOMETER."] that we could understand. On the same island is still shown
the spot where Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes.
Near the spot we
sailed from, the Holy Family
dwelt when they sojourned
in Egypt till Herod
should complete his
slaughter of the innocents.
The same tree they rested
under when they first arrived,
was there a short
time ago, but the Viceroy
of Egypt sent it to the Empress
Eugenie lately. He
was just in time, otherwise
our pilgrims would have
had it.

The Nile at this point is
muddy, swift and turbid,
and does not lack a great
deal of being as wide as the
Mississippi.

We scrambled up the
steep bank at the shabby
town of Ghizeh, mounted
the donkeys again, and
scampered away. For four
or five miles the route lay
along a high embankment which they say is to be the bed of
a railway the Sultan means to build for no other reason than
that when the Empress of the French comes to visit him she
can go to the Pyramids in comfort. This is true Oriental hospitality.
I am very glad it is our privilege to have donkeys
instead of cars.

At the distance of a few miles the Pyramids rising above the
palms, looked very clean-cut, very grand and imposing, and
very soft and filmy, as well. They swam in a rich haze that

took from them all suggestions of unfeeling stone, and made
them seem only the airy nothings of a dream—structures
which might blossom into tiers of vague arches, or ornate colonnades,
may be, and change and change again, into all graceful
forms of architecture, while we looked, and then melt deliciously
away and blend with the tremulous atmosphere.

At the end of the levee we left the mules and went in a sail-boat
across an arm of the Nile or an overflow, and landed
where the sands of the Great Sahara left their embankment,
as straight as a wall, along the verge of the alluvial plain of
the river. A laborious walk in the flaming sun brought us to
the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops. It was a fairy vision
no longer. It was a corrugated, unsightly mountain of stone.
Each of its monstrous sides was a wide stairway which rose
upward, step above step, narrowing as it went, till it tapered
to a point far aloft in the air. Insect men and women—pilgrims
from the Quaker City—were creeping about its dizzy
perches, and one little black swarm were waving postage
stamps from the airy summit—handkerchiefs will be understood.

Of course we were besieged by a rabble of muscular Egyptians
and Arabs who wanted the contract of dragging us to the
top—all tourists are. Of course you could not hear your own
voice for the din that was around you. Of course the Sheiks
said they were the only responsible parties; that all contracts
must be made with them, all moneys paid over to them, and
none exacted from us by any but themselves alone. Of course
they contracted that the varlets who dragged us up should not
mention bucksheesh once. For such is the usual routine. Of
course we contracted with them, paid them, were delivered into
the hands of the draggers, dragged up the Pyramids, and harried
and be-deviled for bucksheesh from the foundation clear to
the summit. We paid it, too, for we were purposely spread
very far apart over the vast side of the Pyramid. There was
no help near if we called, and the Herculeses who dragged us
had a way of asking sweetly and flatteringly for bucksheesh,
which was seductive, and of looking fierce and threatening to

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 622. In-line Illustration. Image of three native men helping a western man up steps that are as tall as the men. The caption reads, "ASCENT OF THE PYRAMID."] throw us down the precipice, which was persuasive and convincing.

Each step being full as high as a dinner-table; there being
very, very many of the steps; an Arab having hold of each of
our arms and springing upward from step to step and snatching
us with them, forcing us to lift our feet as high as our breasts
every time, and do it rapidly and keep it up till we were ready
to faint, who shall say it is not lively, exhilarating, lacerating,
muscle-straining, bone-wrenching and perfectly excruciating
and exhausting pastime, climbing the Pyramids? I beseeched
the varlets not to twist all my joints asunder; I iterated, reiterated,
even swore to them that I did not wish to beat any body
to the top; did all I could to convince them that if I got there
the last of all I would feel
blessed above men and
grateful to them forever;
I begged them, prayed
them, pleaded with them
to let me stop and rest a
moment—only one little
moment: and they only
answered with some more frightful springs, and an unenlisted
volunteer behind opened a bombardment of determined boosts

with his head which threatened to batter my whole political
economy to wreck and ruin.

Twice, for one minute, they let me rest while they extorted
bucksheesh, and then continued their maniac flight up the Pyramid.
They wished to beat the other parties. It was nothing
to them that I, a stranger, must be sacrificed upon the altar of
their unholy ambition. But in the midst of sorrow, joy blooms.
Even in this dark hour I had a sweet consolation. For I knew
that except these Mohammedans repented they would go
straight to perdition some day. And they never repent—they
never forsake their paganism. This thought calmed me,
cheered me, and I sank down, limp and exhausted, upon the
summit, but happy, so happy and serene within.

On the one hand, a mighty sea of yellow sand stretched
away toward the ends of the earth, solemn, silent, shorn of vegetation,
its solitude uncheered by any forms of creature life;
on the other, the Eden of Egypt was spread below us—a broad
green floor, cloven by the sinuous river, dotted with villages,
its vast distances measured and marked by the diminishing
stature of receding clusters of palms. It lay asleep in an enchanted
atmosphere. There was no sound, no motion. Above
the date-plumes in the middle distance, swelled a domed and
pinnacled mass, glimmering through a tinted, exquisite mist;
away toward the horizon a dozen shapely pyramids watched
over ruined Memphis: and at our feet the bland impassible
Sphynx looked out upon the picture from her throne in the
sands as placidly and pensively as she had looked upon its like
full fifty lagging centuries ago.

We suffered torture no pen can describe from the hungry appeals
for bucksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes and poured
incessantly from Arab lips. Why try to call up the traditions
of vanished Egyptian grandeur; why try to fancy Egypt following
dead Rameses to his tomb in the Pyramid, or the long
multitude of Israel departing over the desert yonder? Why
try to think at all? The thing was impossible. One must
bring his meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them
afterward.

The traditional Arab proposed, in the traditional way, to run
down Cheops, cross the eighth of a mile of sand intervening
between it and the tall pyramid of Cephron, ascend to Cephron's
summit and return to us on the top of Cheops—all in
nine minutes by the watch, and the whole service to be rendered
for a single dollar. In the first flush of irritation, I said
let the Arab and his exploits go to the mischief. But stay.
The upper third of Cephron was coated with dressed marble,
smooth as glass. A blessed thought entered my brain. He
must infallibly break his neck. Close the contract with dispatch,
I said, and let him go. He started. We watched. He
went bounding down the vast broadside, spring after spring,
like an ibex. He grew small and smaller till he became a
bobbing pigmy, away down toward the bottom—then disappeared.
We turned and peered over the other side—forty seconds—eighty
seconds—a hundred—happiness, he is dead already!—two
minutes—and a quarter—“There he goes!” Too
true—it was too true. He was very small, now. Gradually,
but surely, he overcame the level ground. He began to spring
and climb again. Up, up, up—at last he reached the smooth
coating—now for it. But he clung to it with toes and fingers,
like a fly. He crawled this way and that—away to the right,
slanting upward—away to the left, still slanting upward—and
stood at last, a black peg on the summit, and waved his pigmy
scarf! Then he crept downward to the raw steps again, then
picked up his agile heels and flew. We lost him presently.
But presently again we saw him under us, mounting with undiminished
energy. Shortly he bounded into our midst with a
gallant war-whoop. Time, eight minutes, forty-one seconds.
He had won. His bones were intact. It was a failure. I reflected.
I said to myself, he is tired, and must grow dizzy. I
will risk another dollar on him.

He started again. Made the trip again. Slipped on the
smooth coating—I almost had him. But an infamous crevice
saved him. He was with us once more—perfectly sound.
Time, eight minutes, forty-six seconds.

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 625. In-line Illustration. Image of a man jumping down from a pyramid while a group of men watch from the top. The caption reads, "HIGH HOPES FRUSTRATED."]

I said to Dan, “Lend me a dollar—I can beat this game, yet.”

Worse and worse. He won again. Time, eight minutes,
forty-eight seconds. I was out of all patience, now. I was
desperate.—Money
was no longer of any
consequence. I said,
“Sirrah, I will give
you a hundred dollars
to jump off this
pyramid head first.
If you do not like the terms, name your bet. I scorn to stand
on expenses now. I will stay right here and risk money on
you as long as Dan has got a cent.”

I was in a fair way to win, now, for it was a dazzling opportunity
for an Arab. He pondered a moment, and would have
done it, I think, but his mother arrived, then, and interfered.
Her tears moved me—I never can look upon the tears of
woman with indifference—and I said I would give her a hundred
to jump off, too.

But it was a failure. The Arabs are too high-priced in
Egypt. They put on airs unbecoming to such savages.

We descended, hot and out of humor. The dragoman lit
candles, and we all entered a hole near the base of the pyramid,
attended by a crazy rabble of Arabs who thrust their services
upon us uninvited. They dragged us up a long inclined
chute, and dripped candle-grease all over us. This chute was
not more than twice as wide and high as a Saratoga trunk,
and was walled, roofed and floored with solid blocks of Egyptian
granite as wide as a wardrobe, twice as thick and three
times as long. We kept on climbing, through the oppressive
gloom, till I thought we ought to be nearing the top of the pyramid
again, and then came to the “Queen's Chamber,” and
shortly to the Chamber of the King. These large apartments
were tombs. The walls were built of monstrous masses of
smoothed granite, neatly joined together. Some of them were
nearly as large square as an ordinary parlor. A great stone
sarcophagus like a bath-tub stood in the centre of the King's
Chamber. Around it were gathered a picturesque group of
Arab savages and soiled and tattered pilgrims, who held their
candles aloft in the gloom while they chattered, and the winking
blurs of light shed a dim glory down upon one of the irrepressible
memento-seekers who was pecking at the venerable sarcophagus
with his sacrilegious hammer.

We struggled out to the open air and the bright sunshine,
and for the space of thirty minutes received ragged Arabs by
couples, dozens and platoons, and paid them bucksheesh for
services they swore and proved by each other that they had
rendered, but which we had not been aware of before—and as
each party was paid, they dropped into the rear of the procession
and in due time arrived again with a newly-invented delinquent
list for liquidation.

We lunched in the shade of the pyramid, and in the midst
of this encroaching and unwelcome company, and then Dan
and Jack and I started away for a walk. A howling swarm of
beggars followed us—surrounded us—almost headed us off. A
sheik, in flowing white bournous and gaudy head-gear, was
with them. He wanted more bucksheesh. But we had adopted
a new code—it was millions for defense, but not a cent for

[ILLUSTRATION]

KING'S CHAMBER IN THE PYRAMID.

[Description: 500EAF. Illustration page. Image of western men in an Egyptian tomb. They are all looking at a sarcophagus.]

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 627. In-line Illustration. Image of a man with a large stick standing over another man, who is sitting on the ground. In the background one man is running away and a group of others are watching. The caption reads, "A POWERFUL ARGUMENT."] bucksheesh. I asked him if he could persuade the others to depart
if we paid him. He said yes—for ten francs. We accepted
the contract, and said—

“Now persuade your vassals to fall back.”

He swung his long staff round his head and three Arabs
bit the dust. He capered among the mob like a very maniac.
His blows fell like hail, and wherever one fell a subject
went down. We had to hurry to the rescue and tell him
it was only
necessary to
damage them a
little, he need
not kill them.—
In two minutes
we were alone
with the sheik,
and remained
so. The persuasive
powers
of this illiterate
savage
were remarkable.

Each side of the Pyramid of Cheops is about as long as the
Capitol at Washington, or the Sultan's new palace on the Bosporus,
and is longer than the greatest depth of St. Peter's at
Rome—which is to say that each side of Cheops extends seven
hundred and some odd feet. It is about seventy-five feet
higher than the cross on St. Peter's. The first time I ever
went down the Mississippi, I thought the highest bluff on the
river between St. Louis and New Orleans—it was near Selma,
Missouri—was probably the highest mountain in the world.
It is four hundred and thirteen feet high. It still looms in my
memory with undiminished grandeur. I can still see the trees
and bushes growing smaller and smaller as I followed them up
its huge slant with my eye, till they became a feathery fringe
on the distant summit. This symmetrical Pyramid of Cheops

—this solid mountain of stone reared by the patient hands of
men—this mighty tomb of a forgotten monarch—dwarfs my
cherished mountain. For it is four hundred and eighty feet
high. In still earlier years than those I have been recalling,
Holliday's Hill, in our town, was to me the noblest work of
God. It appeared to pierce the skies. It was nearly three
hundred feet high. In those days I pondered the subject
much, but I never could understand why it did not swathe its
summit with never-failing clouds, and crown its majestic brow
with everlasting snows. I had heard that such was the custom
of great mountains in other parts of the world. I remembered
how I worked with another boy, at odd afternoons stolen from
study and paid for with stripes, to undermine and start from its
bed an immense boulder that rested upon the edge of that hill-top;
I remembered how, one Saturday afternoon, we gave
three hours of honest effort to the task, and saw at last that our
reward was at hand; I remembered how we sat down, then, and
wiped the perspiration away, and waited to let a picnic party
get out of the way in the road below—and then we started the
boulder. It was splendid. It went crashing down the hill-side,
tearing up saplings, mowing bushes down like grass,
ripping and crushing and smashing every thing in its path—
eternally splintered and scattered a wood pile at the foot of the
hill, and then sprang from the high bank clear over a dray in
the road—the negro glanced up once and dodged—and the next
second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame cooper-shop,
and the coopers swarmed out like bees. Then we said it was
perfectly magnificent, and left. Because the coopers were
starting up the hill to inquire.

Still, that mountain, prodigious as it was, was nothing to the
Pyramid of Cheops. I could conjure up no comparison that
would convey to my mind a satisfactory comprehension of the
magnitude of a pile of monstrous stones that covered thirteen
acres of ground and stretched upward four hundred and eighty
tiresome feet, and so I gave it up and walked down to the
Sphynx.

After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great

face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was
a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity
such as never any thing human wore. It was stone,
but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was
thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape,
yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It
was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and
far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—
over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding,
closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into
one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity.
It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the
empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations
whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched,
whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the
life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow
revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man—of a
faculty of his heart and brain. It was Memory—Retrospection—wrought
into visible, tangible form. All who know
what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished
and faces that have vanished—albeit only a trifling score of
years gone by—will have some appreciation of the pathos that
dwells in these grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon
the things they knew before History was born—before Tradition
had being—things that were, and forms that moved, in a
vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know of—and
passed one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in
the midst of a strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes.

The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its
magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its
story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this
eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds
of all ages, which reveals to one something of what he shall
feel when he shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.

There are some things which, for the credit of America,
should be left unsaid, perhaps; but these very things happen
sometimes to be the very things which, for the real benefit of

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 630. In-line Illustration. Image of a man climbing up the head of the Sphynx. The caption reads, "THE RELIC-HUNTER."] Americans, ought to have prominent notice. While we stood
looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind, appeared on the
jaw of the Sphynx. We heard the familiar clink of a hammer,
and understood
the case at once.
One of our well-meaning
reptiles
—I mean relic-hunters—had

crawled up there
and was trying to
break a “specimen”
from the
face of this the
most majestic creation
the hand of
man has wrought.
But the great image
contemplated
the dead ages as
calmly as ever,
unconscious of
the small insect that was fretting at its jaw. Egyptian granite
that has defied the storms and earthquakes of all time has
nothing to fear from the tack-hammers of ignorant excursionists—highwaymen
like this specimen. He failed in his enterprise.
We sent a sheik to arrest him if he had the
authority, or to warn him, if he had not, that by the laws of
Egypt the crime he was attempting to commit was punishable
with imprisonment or the bastinado. Then he desisted and
went away.

The Sphynx: a hundred and twenty-five feet long, sixty feet
high, and a hundred and two feet around the head, if I remember
rightly—carved out of one solid block of stone harder than any
iron. The block must have been as large as the Fifth Avenue
Hotel before the usual waste (by the necessities of sculpture) of a
fourth or a half of the original mass was begun. I only set

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 631. In-line Illustration. Image of a man on a horse jumping out a castle window. The caption reads, "THE MAMELUKE'S LEAP."] down these figures and these remarks to suggest the prodigious
labor the carving of it so elegantly, so symmetrically, so faultlessly,
must have cost. This species of stone is so hard that figures
cut in it remain sharp and unmarred after exposure to the
weather for two or three thousand years. Now did it take a
hundred years of patient toil to carve the Sphynx? It seems
probable.

Something interfered, and we did not visit the Red Sea and
walk upon the sands of Arabia. I shall not describe the great
mosque of Mehemet Ali, whose entire inner walls are built of
polished and glistening alabaster; I shall not tell how the little
birds have built their nests in the globes of the great chandeliers
that hang in the
mosque, and how they fill
the whole place with their
music and are not afraid
of any body because their
audacity is pardoned, their
rights are respected, and
nobody is allowed to interfere
with them, even
though the mosque be thus
doomed to go unlighted; I
certainly shall not tell the
hackneyed story of the
massacre of the Mamelukes,
because I am glad
the lawless rascals were
massacred, and I do not
wish to get up any sympathy
in their behalf; I shall
not tell how that one solitary
Mameluke jumped his horse a hundred feet down from
the battlements of the citadel and escaped, because I do
not think much of that—I could have done it myself; I shall
not tell of Joseph's well which he dug in the solid rock of the
citadel hill and which is still as good as new, nor how the

same mules he bought to draw up the water (with an endless
chain) are still at it yet and are getting tired of it, too; I shall
not tell about Joseph's granaries which he built to store the
grain in, what time the Egyptian brokers were “selling short,”
unwitting that there would be no corn in all the land when
it should be time for them to deliver; I shall not tell any thing
about the strange, strange city of Cairo, because it is only a repetition,
a good deal intensified and exaggerated, of the Oriental
cities I have already spoken of; I shall not tell of the Great
Caravan which leaves for Mecca every year, for I did not see
it; nor of the fashion the people have of prostrating themselves
and so forming a long human pavement to be ridden
over by the chief of the expedition on its return, to the end
that their salvation may be thus secured, for I did not see that
either; I shall not speak of the railway, for it is like any other
railway—I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive
is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased
by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and
that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly,
“D—n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent—pass
out a King;”[1] I shall not tell of the groups of mud cones
stuck like wasps' nests upon a thousand mounds above high
water-mark the length and breadth of Egypt—villages of the
lower classes; I shall not speak of the boundless sweep of level
plain, green with luxuriant grain, that gladdens the eye as far
as it can pierce through the soft, rich atmosphere of Egypt; I
shall not speak of the vision of the Pyramids seen at a distance
of five and twenty miles, for the picture is too ethereal to be
limned by an uninspired pen; I shall not tell of the crowds of
dusky women who flocked to the cars when they stopped a
moment at a station, to sell us a drink of water or a ruddy,
juicy pomegranate; I shall not tell of the motley multitudes
and wild costumes that graced a fair we found in full blast at
another barbarous station; I shall not tell how we feasted on
fresh dates and enjoyed the pleasant landscape all through the
[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 633. In-line Illustration. Image of two men sitting at a table drinking wine. The caption reads, "WOULD NOT BE COMFORTED."] flying journey; nor how we thundered into Alexandria, at
last, swarmed out of the cars, rowed aboard the ship, left a
comrade behind, (who was to return to Europe, thence home,)
raised the anchor, and turned our bows homeward finally and
forever from the long voyage; nor how, as the mellow sun went
down upon the oldest land on earth, Jack and Moult assembled
in solemn state in the smoking-room and mourned over
the lost comrade the whole night long, and would not be comforted.
I shall not speak a word of any of these things, or write
a line. They shall be as a sealed book. I do not know what a
sealed book is, because I never saw one, but a sealed book is the
expression to use in this connection, because it is popular.

We were glad to have seen the land which was the mother
of civilization—which taught Greece her letters, and through
Greece Rome, and through
Rome the world; the land
which could have humanized
and civilized the hapless
children of Israel, but
allowed them to depart out
of her borders little better
than savages. We were glad
to have seen that land which
had an enlightened religion
with future eternal rewards
and punishment in it, while
even Israel's religion contained
no promise of a hereafter.
We were glad to have
seen that land which had
glass three thousand years before England
had it, and could paint upon it as
none of us can paint now; that land
which knew, three thousand years
ago, well nigh all of medicine and
surgery which science has discovered lately; which had all
those curious surgical instruments which science has invented

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 500EAF. Page 634. In-line Illustration. Image of two men on camels holding sun shades and one man walking.] recently; which had in high excellence a thousand luxuries
and necessities of an advanced civilization which we have
gradually contrived and accumulated in modern times and
claimed as things that were new under the sun; that had
paper untold centuries before we dreampt of it—and waterfalls
before our women thought of them; that had a perfect
system of common schools so long before we boasted of our
achievements in that direction that it seems forever and forever
ago; that so embalmed the dead that flesh was made almost immortal—which
we can not do; that built temples which mock
at destroying time and smile grimly upon our lauded little prodigies
of architecture; that old land that knew all which we
know now, perchance, and more; that walked in the broad
highway of civilization in the gray dawn of creation, ages and
ages before we were born; that left the impress of exalted, cultivated
Mind upon the eternal front of the Sphynx to confound
all scoffers who, when all her other proofs had passed away,
might seek to persuade the world that imperial Egypt, in the
days of her high renown, had groped in darkness.