only bearing the name of Amen-Ra or Thothmes III., but for well-coloured specimens and for old kings' names, a higher price is asked, even a napoleon, or £1, being sometimes demanded, and not unfrequently paid by enthusiastic collectors. Before you give so much you should borrow the scarab for a day and obtain warranty for its genuineness from a good judge.

DASHOOK.

CHAPTER VI.

THE PYRAMIDS AND THE SPHINX.

How English Tourists see the Pyramids-The Great Time-passage Theory-The True History of Pyramids-A List of Pyramids from the Papyrus-Their Identification-Pyramids now remaining— Their Comparative Heights-The Riddle of the Sphinx unsolved— The Question of the Tablet-Its Want of Authority-The Use of the Sphinx in Hieroglyphs-The Table of Thothmes-Description from Charlotte Brontë-An Irreverent Sightseer.

It is only after repeated inspection that an adequate idea is obtained of the so-called Pyramid-field. Familiarity brings the most wonderful sights into their proper perspective. After a third or fourth visit, the bigness of the Pyramid of Shoofoo no longer weighs upon the mind, the height of the Pyramid of Chafra

no longer overshadows it; the whole platform begins to assume its true aspect. It is the Kensal Green of Memphis. The traveller who comes to Egypt with a preformed theory about the Great Pyramid and its purpose, and who canters out from Cairo on a glaring day, is dragged up to the top, hustled through passages of the diameter of a gas-pipe, alternately exposed to the brightest sunshine and the blackest darkness, who is next hurried down across the hot sand to stare at the Sphinx, and finally chased through the dust by a yelling donkey-boy the long seven miles back to Cairo, supposes he has thoroughly "done" the whole thing. He fondly imagines that in all his after-life he will be an authority on Pyramids, and will be capable, in the home circle, if not in a wider sphere, of giving a valuable opinion on the theory of Mr. Taylor and Mr. Smyth. One need not be surprised if he pronounces strongly in its favour. The performance he has gone through is calculated alike to fatigue his body and confuse his mind. His attention has been wholly concentrated on the Great Pyramid. Its height, its rugged stones, the vociferations of the Arab guides, the giddiness which the steep slope or the sun's rays induced when he was on the summit, the broken shin acquired in the exploration of the interior, the temporary blindness after he came out, the grand chorus of backsheesh which signalised his departure, and a thousand other impressions equally vivid, mingle admirably with the

ignorance or prejudice he brought out, and conduce to the formation of what he boasts is a cool and unwarped opinion. He has certainly seen something, superficially, of one Pyramid; but what did he see of the nine or ten which are near it, of the fifty-nine which are further off? He has not read, supposing he could read, a single hieroglyph. He has not the vaguest knowledge of early Egyptian history. He is perfectly certain that the world was created BC. 4004, and believes that the odd four years were part of the original revelation. He has probably never heard of Lepsius, certainly never of Lieblein. He is not acquainted with the name of a single Pyramid, and has no more knowledge of the table of Sakkara, or the table of Abydos, than of the Turin papyrus. He considers it best to keep his mind free and unfettered, and is all the more positive as to what he imagines he does know. The man who, after a personal visit to the cemetery of Gheezeh, can continue in the nurture and admonition of those who believe in the Sacred Cubit, the Time-passage theory, the Meteorological theory, or any other tenet of the sect of which Mr. Smyth is presumably the prophet, must have been convinced on evidence very different from the evidence of the senses. I should be sorry to disturb a faith which is so wholly ethereal that it is independent of facts, and whose votaries are as much beyond the influence of argument as of plain proof.

Rightly understood, a Pyramid is neither more nor less than a cairn. It grew up from a cairn, and it was resolved into a cairn again. When it first emerges on the stage of history it is sufficiently rude and incomplete. If antiquaries are right inascribing the Pyramid in steps at Sakkara to Vanephes, a king of the first dynasty, this is by far the oldest building in the world; but, in spite of some recent assertions to the effect that his name has been found in it, the point is more than doubtful. Vanephes lived at least as long before Shoofoo as William the Conqueror lived before Queen Anne. It is certainly recorded by Manetho that he built Pyramids; and, further, that they were situated at a place called Kochome, which M. Brugsch identifies with the northern part of the cemetery of Sakkara. Many heaps, more or less well defined, exist here, and any of them may be the Pyramids of Vanephes as well as the Pyramid in steps. There is an irreconcilable discrepancy between the two passages of Manetho in which, under the name of Vanephes, he speaks of the first Pyramids, and under Kaiechos, more than a century later, of the first setting-up of the sacred bulls, if this Pyramid was built, as has sometimes been supposed, for an Apis mausoleum. In fact, it differs so much, with its two entrances, its thirty chambers, but chiefly in its not facing the points of the compass, from all the seventy Pyramids found here and elsewhere, that it must be looked upon as