“All right! Very good!!
Hard work. Good boys!!
Mr. Frank satisfied!!
On top pay money.”
This was a continual reminder of my indebtedness to them, and they enforced their song with more numerous jerks the higher we rose. They were surprised when I refused to give them any backsheesh until we got to the bottom, and lifted me down about as jerkily as they had pulled me up.
I went inside the Pyramid to examine the great chambers, which are quite as wonderful as the outside construction. They are built of granite blocks so closely joined that one cannot put a pin between the crevices. The Queen’s Chamber is seventeen feet wide by eighteen feet long, and its ceiling is twenty feet high. It is as dark as the night which the Lord spread over Egypt when He wanted to soften the heart of Pharaoh, but the night was turned into day by the burning of magnesium, and we could see the wonderful polish on the walls. The King’s Chamber is lined entirely with granite and is as big as a country church. It would take one hundred and twenty-five yards of carpet to cover its floor. Its ceiling, which is nineteen feet high, is roofed with nine enormous slabs of granite, each of which is eighteen feet long. The only thing within the chamber is a great sarcophagus about three feet wide and three feet deep, and just long enough to contain the body of a man. There are also other chambers in this Pyramid. When one considers the machinery of the times, its structure is a marvel. Its cost can hardly be estimated in the money of to-day. Before it was mutilated, there was on it a record of the radishes, onions, and garlic which had been distributed among the workmen. These alone cost one million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, so the monument itself must have cost many millions more. Yet, after all, it is nothing but the tomb of a king.
In coming down from the top of the Pyramid my Bedouin guides landed me at the opposite corner from whence I started, and here was a camel ready to take me to the Sphinx. It is only about a quarter of a mile from one to the other, but few ever think of walking through the sand, especially after the Pyramid exercise.
The Sphinx seems bigger, more sombre, and more wonderful than ever. Her face is that of a remarkably good-looking Negro girl, though it is said that her complexion was originally of a beautiful pink. All of this pink has now been worn away by the sands of the desert, which have for more than six thousand years been showering their amorous kisses upon it, until all that is left is a little red paint just under the left eye. That figure with the head and bust of a woman upon the body of a lion, carved out of the ages-old rock which stood here upon the desert, has been noted among the peoples of the world as far back as history extends, and those stony eyes have seen civilization after civilization rise and fall.
It would take a good-sized city lot to hold the Sphinx. The body is one hundred and forty feet long, and the paws each measure fifty feet. Her head alone is so big that a vault fourteen feet square and the height of a three-story house would be just large enough to contain it. Though you measure six feet in your stockings and have arms as long as those of Abraham Lincoln, if you stood on the tip of this old lady’s ear you could hardly touch the crown of her head. The ear by actual measurement has a length of over four feet, and if that mouth would open it could swallow an ox. The nose is five feet seven inches long, and originally partook of an Ethiopian character. Now, however, it is sadly mutilated, for it has formed a target both for the conquering Mohammedans of the past and the vandal Bedouins of a later day. Tradition says, too, that Napoleon cut off the nose to spite Egypt when he was forced to retreat from the country. In front of the Sphinx lies a temple, in the ruins of which one moves about under ground through a series of dark chambers where some wonderful statues and mummies were found. Among the halls there is one room seventy-nine feet long and twenty-three feet wide.