“The base is square,” said Thrasyllus, “and the summit is square, but looks pointed.”
“To me they seem strange, mysterious embodiments of vastness,” said Lucius. “What are they actually?”
“We don’t altogether know,” replied Thrasyllus. “Some of the pyramids were sepulchres of kings and sacred animals. Those are the pyramids of Cheops, or Khufu, of Chephren and of Mencheres; and we shall see the kings’ chambers inside them. They were built twenty, perhaps thirty centuries ago. Herodotus says that the pyramid of Cheops, which is the biggest, took thirty years to build with a hundred thousand slaves, who were changed every three months. The name is derived from πῦρ fire, because, like a flame, the pyramid ends in a point. Many were used as store-houses in the long years of famine; others were dykes against the sands of the desert, which blew towards Memphis and threatened to bury the city, in a succession of ages. Many pyramids have already been swallowed up in the sands.”
“What are those ruined palaces over there?” asked Lucius, pointing to crumbled rows of pylons and pillars, surmounted by cracked architraves, impressive ruins which stood on a hill at the outskirts of the town and seemed to be tumbling into the Nile.
“The old palaces of the Pharaohs,” said Thrasyllus. “They were ten in number. Joseph, the Jewish interpreter of dreams, was a powerful governor under one of them; Moses, who knew Hermes Trismegistus and learned the occult wisdom from him, all the wisdom that can be known, was saved, as a babe, by the daughter of a Pharaoh, where his sister had exposed him in a basket made of bulrushes at the place where the princess was wont to bathe: she was the daughter of Amenophis III., who saw his people smitten with ten plagues sent over Egypt by Jahve, the God of the Jews, because the Pharaoh would not suffer them to leave the country. This Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea and was the father of Sesostris.... I have written on these scrolls everything that is more or less interesting.”
And Thrasyllus, glad to see that Lucius’ attention was attracted, handed him the scrolls. Lucius began reading:
“This all happened here!” he said, startled and arrested. “This is all ... the past! The age-old past, which is gone, which was swallowed up by the sands ... thousands of years ago!... How small we are when we look into the past ... and when we gaze into the centuries, the centuries that have buried themselves so deeply!”
“My son,” said the old tutor, “I am so thankful that your mind is once more capable of receiving these impressions. For the beauty of the past is a comfort for the future; and the sick soul is healed in that beauty when it understands that its own grief is but a grain of sand in a desert which blows in the wind and conceals all things.”
Lucius made no further reply, absorbed in what he was reading about Joseph and Moses, about Jahve and Pharaoh Amenophis, who was the father of Sesostris....