When he reached the top, they wanted some “backsheesh,” and he was injudicious enough to give it. This opened the ball, and they kept at him; and he gave away, there and at the base of the pyramid, something over twenty-five francs. Each man who pulled and each who pushed wanted something; the fellows who lifted at the turban wanted something, and the owner of the turban wanted something for the use of it; the man who carried his overcoat wanted something, and so did the cane-bearer and the water-bearer; then the other fellows wanted something, and after they had received something all around separately, they asked for a general fee in addition. You could no more satisfy these brigands with any ordinary lot of money, than you could bail out Lake Erie with a teaspoon.
Originally, the summit of the great pyramid was a point or very nearly so; it has been removed so that it is now about thirty feet square, some of the blocks resting higher than others. You can sit around them there very comfortably, but there isn’t much to see when you are there—that is, nothing very different from what you can see at the base. On the west is the desert, north is the rich delta of the Nile, east is Cairo, beyond the river and backed by the Mokattaw and other hills that fill the horizon, and south there is the valley of the Nile, opening between the double lines of desert on either side. There are no mountains to attract the eye with their varieties of color and jaggedness of outline; there are no lakes shining in the sunlight, and there is no glimpse of the ocean with its ever-beating waves.
The prettiest artificial features of the landscape are the walls and domes and minarets of Cairo, and the most salient natural features are the sharp contrast of valley and desert. There is no intermediate ground; at one place it is rich alluvium, and six inches away lies the arid sand. The one is a deep, rich green; the other is a greyish white, dazzling where it reflects the sun, and tinted with the faintest shade of purple where it does not. The one is the perfection of fertility, the most fecund spot of land on the globe; the other is bleak and utter sterility, with not the tiniest blade of grass or shred of lichen to relieve its desolation. Nature draws nowhere a picture of sharper contrasts.
Out from the deserts in the southern horizon comes the Nile, freighted with the mud which makes the wealth of Egypt. It is more than that—it is Egypt, and were it not for this river, the land of the Pharaohs, the Caliphs, and the Khedive would not exist. You can trace the river as it winds away through the Delta and separates into the branches and canals which enable it to distribute its blessings over a wide area There is no point where you can better realize how much the Nile is Egypt than when you look from the summit of the great pyramid.
While we were at the summit, an Arab proposed to run from where we stood to the top of the second pyramid in ten minutes, a feat which at first glance seemed impossible. We finally agreed to give him five francs if he would do it, and away he started. He jumped from block to block with the agility of a monkey, at about the rate that an able-bodied boy descends an ordinary staircase, when he is in a hurry to get something at the bottom. He ran across the space between the pyramids and up the other, but I observed that he made the ascent with less appearance of hurry than when descending the first. He made the journey in a little more than ten minutes, and I have heard of an Arab doing it inside of eight minutes.
This is one of the stock amusements of the trip to the pyramids, and I have a book, written thirty years ago, in which the same feat is mentioned.
We offered to give the whole crowd of Arabs five francs each if they would stand at the edge of the platform and then turn a somersault downwards and outwards; they were inclined to consider the matter at first, but one of them, after a moment’s thought, exclaimed, “It would kill us; we no do it.”