A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

The color again is a surprise. Few persons can be aware beforehand of the rich tawny hue that Egyptian limestone assumes after ages of exposure to the blaze of an Egyptian sky. Seen in certain lights, the pyramids look like piles of massy gold.

Having but one hour and forty minutes to spend on the spot, we resolutely refused on this first occasion to be shown anything, or told anything, or to be taken anywhere—except, indeed, for a few minutes to the brink of the sand hollow in which the Sphinx lies couchant. We wished to give our whole attention, and all the short time at our disposal, to the great pyramid only. To gain some impression of the outer aspect and size of this enormous structure—to steady our minds to something like an understanding of its age—was enough, and more than enough, for so brief a visit.

For it is no easy task to realize, however imperfectly, the duration of six or seven thousand years; and the great pyramid, which is supposed to have been some four thousand two hundred and odd years old at the time of the birth of Christ, is now in its seventh millenary. Standing there close against the base of it; touching it; measuring her own height against one of its lowest blocks; looking up all the stages of that vast, receding, rugged wall, which leads upward like an Alpine buttress and seems almost to touch the sky, the writer suddenly became aware that these remote dates had never presented themselves to her mind until this moment as anything but abstract numerals. Now, for the first time, they resolved themselves into something concrete, definite, real. They were no longer figures, but years with their changes of season, their high and low Niles, their seed-times and harvests. The consciousness of that moment will never, perhaps, quite wear away. It was as if one had been snatched up for an instant to some vast height overlooking the plains of time, and had seen the centuries mapped out beneath one’s feet.

To appreciate the size of the great pyramid is less difficult than to apprehend its age. No one who has walked the length of one side, climbed to the top, and learned the dimensions from Murray, can fail to form a tolerably clear idea of its mere bulk. The measurements given by Sir Gardner Wilkinson are as follows: Length of each side, 732 feet; perpendicular height, 480 feet 9 inches; area, 535,824 square feet.[3] That is to say it stands 115 feet 9 inches higher than the cross on the top of St. Paul’s and about 20 feet lower than Box Hill in Surrey; and if transported bodily to London, it would a little more than cover the whole area of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. These are sufficiently matter-of-fact statements and sufficiently intelligible; but, like most calculations of the kind, they diminish rather than do justice to the dignity of the subject.

More impressive by far than the weightiest array of figures or the most striking comparisons, was the shadow cast by the great pyramid as the sun went down. That mighty shadow, sharp and distinct, stretched across the stony platform of the desert and over full three quarters of a mile of the green plain below. It divided the sunlight where it fell, just as its great original divided the sunlight in the upper air; and it darkened the space it covered, like an eclipse. It was not without a thrill of something approaching to awe that one remembered how this self-same shadow had gone on registering not only the height of the most stupendous gnomon ever set up by human hands, but the slow passage day by day of more than sixty centuries of the world’s history.

It was still lengthening over the landscape as we went down the long sand-slope and regained the carriage. Some six or eight Arabs in fluttering white garments ran on ahead to bid us a last good-by. That we should have driven over from Cairo only to sit quietly down and look at the great pyramid had filled them with unfeigned astonishment. With such energy and dispatch as the modern traveler uses, we might have been to the top and seen the temple of the Sphinx and done two or three of the principal tombs in the time.

“You come again!” said they. “Good Arab show you everything. You see nothing this time!”

So, promising to return ere long, we drove away; well content, nevertheless, with the way in which our time had been spent.

The pyramid Bedouins have been plentifully abused by travelers and guide-books, but we found no reason to complain of them now or afterward. They neither crowded round us, nor followed us, nor importuned us in any way. They are naturally vivacious and very talkative; yet the gentle fellows were dumb as mutes when they found we wished for silence. And they were satisfied with a very moderate bakhshîsh at parting.

As a fitting sequel to this excursion, we went, I think next day, to see the mosque of Sultan Hassan, which is one of those mediæval structures said to have been built with the casing-stones of the great pyramid.