30th November ‘85.—“A sweet gentle morning; limpid air, lovely fresh clouds in a soft blue sky. We started at 11 in a carriage, with our dragoman, and were soon taken at the usual hand gallop over the big iron bridge with the colossal green lions at each end which spans the wide Nile, into the acacia-shaded road which runs for a long distance in an imposing straight line to almost the very base of the great Pyramid. As we sped towards the illustrious group which we saw rising grey and stern at the very edge of the desert where it meets the bright green of the cultivated land we alternately looked ahead at what was awaiting us and at the ever-interesting groups of men, women, children, and animals which we passed, and at the mud villages with their palms and rude domes and minarets which lay in the well-watered, low-lying land on either side of the road. From the first moment I saw the Pyramids afar off I knew I was not destined to be disappointed, and my apprehensions caused by some travellers’ descriptions vanished at the outset. It is difficult to put my feelings into words as I came nearer and nearer to these wonders of man’s work, so pathetic in their antiquity and in the evidence they give of their builders’ colossal failure to ensure for their poor bodies absolute safety during the long waiting for the Resurrection. The seals are broken, the secret places found out, the contents gone to the winds!
“My beloved father was constantly in my mind to-day, for he it was who with such patience taught us the value and fascinating interest of old Egyptian history, and here were some of the scenes he used to read to us of so often, but which he himself was not allowed to see. “Mrs. C—— and I, on getting out of the carriage, first made the circuit of the Great Pyramid—a space of ‘thirteen statute acres,’ I remember Menzies telling us. I found that the most striking point from which to feel the immensity of the Pyramids is in the centre of the base, not the angles.
“We hear of ‘weeping stone.’ Here is stone that has wept blood and tears! Each succeeding year of the king’s reign forced an additional coating to his tomb, and prolonged the slave-toil under the lash—all to safeguard a little dust that has now vanished. This age of ours is about the time the old Egyptians looked to for the Great Awakening, for which all their poor mummies were embalmed.
“How intolerable these three Pyramids must have looked when new and entirely coated with white marble. Their glitter under the blinding sunlight and the hardness of their repellent shapes make me shudder as I realise the effect. Seen in the rough, as they now are, they do not jar, but only oppress the mind by their ponderous immensity, and the eye takes great pleasure in their tawny colouring.
“We next went down to the Sphinx and rested a long while in its broad shadow. The gaze of the eyes is exceedingly impressive, and though the face is so mutilated one would not have it restored. Strange that one should prefer the broken nose and the hare-lip! It would not be the Sphinx if it had the universal Sphinx face as originally carved. Originally! When? It was there long before the Pyramids, and it now appears that more than the ‘forty centuries’ looked down upon Napoleon’s army from their summits. Sixty centuries, some say now. Time is annihilated as one stands confronted with the Sphinx, and a feeling of annihilation swirls around one’s own microscopic personality.
“This annihilation of Time is one of the sensations of Egypt. Look at Rameses the Great in his glass coffin in the Cairo Museum. There, more than ever, the intervening cycles are as though they had never been as one stands face to face with Sesostris. More appalling than the Sphinx—a chimera in stone—here is the Man. Not his effigy, not his mask taken after death, but the Man! There is his hair, rusted by the Ages, his teeth still in their sockets, the gash across his forehead cleft in battle. His father lies in the next glass case, his grandfather on the other side, and many other Pharaohs similarly enclosed in glass and docketed lie around, all torn out of their hiding-places, stripped of their multitudinous envelopes, and exposed to the stare of the passers-by. Their mortuary jewels are ticketed in other glass cases, and only a few shreds of winding-sheet adhere to their bodies. They were religiously preserved, at infinite pains, for this.
“From the entrance to the Great Pyramid in the north face I had an enchanting view of Cairo on the right, in sun and shadow with a sky of most beautiful cloud-forms, and on the left the lovely pearly and rosy desert stretching away into the golden West. How cheerily, how consolingly the wholesome, refreshing Present receives us back after those wanderings down the corridors of the dead Ages! Let us wash our faces and smile again and feel young. The drive back was exhilarating and full of living interest. We overtook shepherds guiding their flocks along the road and carrying tired lambs on their shoulders. There were buffaloes and oxen and ploughmen going home from work in the tender after-glow, and then as soon as we were over the big iron bridge and in the suburbs again it was dark, and the gas lamps were being lighted, and ‘Tommy Atkins’ was about, and British officers were riding in from polo, and the cafés of this Parisianized quarter were full and noisy, and I felt I had leapt back into To-day by crossing an iron bridge that spanned six thousand years. My thoughts lingered long amongst the most ancient, most pathetic, most solemn monuments of the pre-Christian world.”
