CHAPTER II
A little over a century ago the past of Egypt was concealed from living eyes. The Pyramids still stood four-square to the sandstorms of the desert as they had stood for ages, the Sphinx regarded the Nile with the same inscrutable gaze that had puzzled the ancients. Throughout Egypt were mighty ruins, but little was known about them.
People used to sit astride their asses and jog along into the stony places to see the relics. They saw merely heaps of stones, buildings grown so old that they had toppled to pieces. There were broken statues and shattered columns lying in the utmost confusion. There were mountains of sand, with fragments of masonry protruding. Occasionally, amid the shifting sands, a few columns stood upright, some so strangely shaped that their like was not to be seen elsewhere on earth.
They added to the general mystery of Egypt. The natives were poor, utterly incapable of building on such a gigantic scale. How, then, did the original buildings get there? By whom were they erected, and for what purpose?
THIS PILE OF MIGHTY BLOCKS OF STONE, THROWN DOWN AS IF BY GIANTS IN PLAY, GIVES AN IDEA OF THE MAGNIFICENCE AND HUGE SIZE OF SOME OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN BUILDINGS. THE PEOPLE GAZING IN WONDER ON THE GLORIES OF THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK ARE ALMOST LOST TO SIGHT AMONG THE MASSIVE RUINS
Most people asked many questions, and received different answers. The myths of the natives are as numerous as the broken monuments, but, whereas the broken stones are facts, the myths woven round them were often otherwise. Any fanciful story that served to win money from the traveller was repeated in a variety of ways, and any little truth there may have been originally was lost in continued repetition.
The ruins, however, could not lie. They said, as plainly as stones can speak: “We were fashioned by Man in the long ago, and the sun shone on us in our glory just as it shines on us in our decay.”
Fortunately, all men did not merely look at the ruins and pass on their way voicing their amazement. Some were so fascinated by what they saw that they could not leave it, and these are gradually unfolding to us one of the most romantic stories in the world, a romance beside which the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is but a single chapter.
The spoils collected in Egypt during the time of Napoleon turned the attention of scientists to the Nile. Men began to work to see if they could unravel the past from the evidence afforded by the remains. They began to dig. And, to-day, in the arid places of the earth are many men toiling like navvies, suffering untold discomforts, living in huts and delving in ruins to add to our knowledge of the past. These are the men who are writing history. They are doing it not with a pen, but with spade and pick.