A house thirty feet square might rest on the flattened apex of the Great Pyramid, but originally it was much higher and came to a sharp point. All the pyramids have been robbed of their stones by house builders in Cairo.
“If you will climb upon your dining room table 250 times you will have an idea of my ascent of the stepping-stone sides of the Great Pyramid. At the base the huge blocks are waist-high.”
CHAPTER X
CLIMBING THE GREAT PYRAMID
On my second trip to Egypt I followed a telephone line in going from Cairo to the Pyramids and as I waded through the sands from the edge of the Nile valley up the plateau where old Cheops stands, I could see a party of foreigners playing lawn-tennis in the court of the hotel which has been built near its base. The next improvement in modernizing Egypt will probably be cable roads running to the top of these great piles of stone. Already a flagstaff has been planted on the very apex of the biggest of them.
In driving to the Pyramids I passed along an avenue of acacia trees, the intertwining branches of which formed a grand arbour extending to the desert seven miles away. This splendid road was made in a few weeks by order of the extravagant Khedive Ismail Pasha at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal. He had it constructed so that his distinguished visitor, the Empress Eugénie, might drive comfortably to the Pyramids! It is built ten feet above the fields of the Nile valley and on each side the green stretches away to the north and south until it is lost in the horizon. One sees groves of palm trees, camels and donkeys, farmers ploughing and women carrying water, together with the other strange scenes that make up the oriental setting of this land of the Arabian Nights.
Leaving Cairo, I crossed the fine iron bridge which spans the Nile and is guarded by great bronze lions at each end. I passed the tax office; I saw farmers bringing chickens, pigeons, and grass or vegetables into Cairo and stopping to pay a tax upon them before they could offer them for sale. On I went past a branch of the Nile, where naked men stood in the water and slapped clothes up and down on stones in washing them; by wells where women were filling great jars with water and bearing them away upon their heads, as they did in the days of Rachel when Jacob gave her that kiss and made the scene which the Italian artists love to paint; and on out into the country, through this greenest of the green valley of Egypt. I went by caravans of camels ridden by Bedouins who were carrying merchandise into Cairo to sell. The air was as fresh as America in springtime, and the sweet scent of the grass and the clover was blown into my face by the bracing wind from the desert.