“How on earth could they build anything like that?” asked Teddy, under his breath.
“Uncle Amos says that nobody knows,” replied Don. “He says that it’s doubtful whether modern engineers could do it at all, even with the tools they have to-day and that they didn’t have when these were built six thousand years ago. Probably it was done almost altogether by man power.
“Uncle Amos says that it took a hundred thousand men ten years just to build the sloping road that led up to it. And it took that many men thirty years to build this one Pyramid. They must have had ropes with thousands of men hauling the stones along on rollers and then pulling them up and piling them on each other.”
“If one of the ropes broke, the stones tumbling down must have crushed hundreds at a time,” remarked Teddy. “I guess it wasn’t peaches and cream to be a laborer in those days.”
“I guess not,” agreed Don. “Little old America is good enough for me.”
Five hundred yards away from the Great Pyramid was the head of the Sphinx, that lion-bodied, human-headed mystery of the ages, carved out of the mother rock that forms the floor of the desert. Nearly two hundred feet from the tip of its paws to the end of its back, it rose sixty-five feet in the air, gazing out over the desert in immutable stony silence.
“What that could tell if it could speak,” murmured Don.
After some further explorations the two boys turned toward the city, which lay white-walled and glittering in the afternoon sun.
That evening the captain, looking over one of his suitcases, noted the absence of one of his revolvers.
“I was cleaning and oiling some of my weapons down in the dahabiyeh,” he said, after looking about fruitlessly for a time. “I thought I’d brought them all back here but I must have left that 38-caliber there. Would you mind running down there, Don, and taking a look for it? You’ll find one of the men in charge.”