Thus it is. And thus it is that we often realize some disenchantment. I had often done so, but nothing will ever come up to the keen intensity of my disappointment, or the bitter revulsion of feeling as we approached the Pyramids and obtained a good view of them.
"They may grow grander as we come nearer," I said. But no; I think they really diminished rather than increased on a nearer approach. The Pyramids stand on a natural platform of rock. The three are in a line: the second, or Pyramid of Chephren, touches the angle of the first, or that of Cheops; and that of the third, the Pyramid of Mycerinus, that of Chephren.
Thus, as you draw near, it becomes a line of perspective, in which each pyramid recedes and recedes behind the greater one, till only Cheops is left in solitary glory.
But even thus he does not seem stupendous; he does not seem to crush you with his size, to be ungraspable from height, to be immeasurable for width. He does not impress you with a feeling of your own insignificance. He is very large—that is all.
Even when we had driven up the last steep ascent and stood under his very shadow, I felt scarcely more impressed. There was a peculiar effect of following with the eye some way up, and then suddenly feeling that the pyramid was receding from your sight—when you saw that you were looking at its cone.
You must gaze upon the Pyramids, bearing in your mind's eye all the time the grand idea that called them into existence; the despotic monarch who thought to build for himself an everlasting monument, who thought, by the stupendousness of the work, to preserve his body when all others should have perished, to perpetuate the memory of his reign to worlds of generation.
The vanity of all human aims and desires! The tomb was opened, sacked for the treasures of gold and silver that so great a builder would surely have interred with his remains. And the bones of Cheops—where are they now? Consigned to the sand of the desert, to the dust whence he came.
It is wonderful to think that this outer pyramid is only the covering for a number of similar ones inside; how many, is only conjectured by the size of the outer one. When the building of a pyramid was commenced, a piece of rock, it is said, was taken as the centre to form the support of the apex of the first tiny pyramid, and then a space was hollowed out in the rock wherein the sarcophagus would rest some day. The pyramid grew with the length of the reign of the royal builder. Year by year its growth increased, and at his death it was finished off at the point it had then reached.
Various theories have been advanced as to the use of the Pyramids. Some have thought they were for astronomical purposes. One, that it was simply a meterological monument, large enough to serve for all kinds of measurements; but Egyptologists are now agreed in thinking they are tombs "hermetically sealed everywhere, the for ever impenetrable casing of a mummy."
There are many who will share in Lord Lindsay's beautiful but mystic idea of their origin, but I for one do not.