THE best view of Cairo and its vicinity is obtained from the Citadel, which commands the whole city. It is thus described by Dean Stanley: "The town is a vast expanse of brown, broken only by occasional interludes of palms and sycamores, and by countless minarets.① About half a dozen large buildings, mosques or palaces, also emerge. On each side rise shapeless mounds;-those on the east covered with tents, and, dimly seen beyond, the browner line of the desert; those on the west, the sites of Old Cairo, of the Roman fortress of Babylon, and of Fostat, where Amrou② first pitched his tent, deserted since the time of Sal"adin. Beyond is the silver line of the Nile; and then, rising in three successive groups, above the delicate green plain which sweeps along nearly to the foot of the African hills, the Pyramids of Abu"sir, Saka"rah, and Ghi"zeh-these last being "The Pyramids ," and the nearest. There is something very striking in their total disconnection with Cairo. They stand alone on the edge of that green vale which is Egypt. There is no intermingling, as in ancient and modem Rome. It is as if you looked out on Stonehenge③ from London, or as if the Colis"um④ stood far away in the depths of the Campagna.⑤ Cairo is not "the ghost of the dead Egyptian empire," nor anything like it. Cairo itself leaves a deep feeling, that, whatever there was of greatness or wisdom in those remote ages and those gigantic monuments, is now the inheritance, not of the East, but of the West. The Nile, as it glides between the tombs of the Pharaohs⑥ and the city of the Caliphs,⑦ is indeed a boundary between two worlds."The Pyramids stand at the edge of the desert, on the western side of the Nile, but an hour or two"s distance fromCAIRO FROM THE CITADEL (LOOKING WEST)the city. After crossing the ferry, the stranger imagines them close at hand, though he has still a good long mile to traverse. A near view is generally disappointing; and it is not until the visitor begins to make comparisons, that the fact of their exceeding vastness comes home to the mind. The base of the Great Pyramid of Cheops is nearly 800 feet square, covering a surface of eleven acres; and its height is 461 feet, being 117 feet higher than St. Paul"s Cathedral. It is a common feat of travellers to ascend, with the aid of a couple of Arab guides, to the summit; which may be reached by an active man in about twenty minutes.
"The view from the top," says Stanley, "has the same vivid contrast of life and death which makes all wide views in Egypt striking-the desert and the green plain: only the view over the desert-the African desert-being much more extensive here than elsewhere, one gathers in better the notion of the wide, heaving ocean of sandy billows, which hovers on the edge of the Valley of the Nile. The white line of the minarets of Cairo is also a peculiar feature-peculiar, because it is strange to see a modern Egyptian city which is a grace instead of a deformityto the view. You see also the strip of desert running into the green plain on the east of the Nile, which marks Heliop"olis and Goshen."It is said that six million tons of stone were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid, that of Che"ops,⑧ and that its erection occupied one hundred thousand men for twenty years! The mass is not solid, but contains a series of chambers, the entrance to which is on the north side. A long, close, and devious passage leads to the Queen"s Chamber, 17 feet long by 12 high. From thence another long passage leads to the King"s Chamber, 37 feet by 17, and 20 feet high. At one end of this apartment stands a sarcophagus⑨ of red granite, in which the monarch of the greatest kingdom of the Earth is supposed to have been laid.
The second Pyramid, that of Chephre"nes,⑩ is not muchinferior in size to this one, its base being 684 feet, and its height 456; but it is not in such good preservation. Herodotus had asserted that it contained no chambers; but Belzoni effected an entrance to a chamber hewn out of the solid rock. In the sarcophagus he found the bones of an animal, probably the sacred bull of the Egyptians. The third large Pyramid contained a mummy; the remains of which, and of its cedar coffin, were deposited in the British Museum.
There can be no doubt that all of them were designed as receptacles for the dead. Around them lie scattered about, as far as the eye can reach, both up and down the bank of the river, and along the edge of the desert for miles beyond the ruined city of Memphis, numberless edifices and tumuli of a monumental character, some of which were once profusely embellished with sculptures, and in which mummies have been found.
