founders are
surely known. There are plausible suppositions enough about them, each
writer upon the subject having plenty of arguments to support his
special convictions; but their history rests, after all is said, amid a
confusion of very thin speculation. There is little genius evinced in
the design or execution of the Pyramids. Neither art, taste, nor
religion is in any way subserved by these unequalled follies. There is
no architectural excellence in them, though great skill is evinced in
their construction, they are merely enormous piles of stone. Some
pronounce them marvellous as evidences of ancient greatness and power.
True; but if it were desirable, we could build loftier and larger ones
in our day. As they are doubtless over four thousand years old, we admit
that they are venerable, and that they are entitled to a certain degree
of consideration on that account. In the religious instinct which led
the Buddhists to build, at such enormous expense of time and money, the
cave-temples of Elephanta, Ellora, and Carlee; in the idolatrous Hindoo
temples of Madura and Tanjore, the shrines of Ceylon, the pagodas of
China, and the temples of Japan, one detects an underlying and elevating
sentiment, a grand and reverential idea, in which there may be more of
acceptable veneration than we can fully appreciate; but in the Pyramids
we have no expression of devotion, only an embodiment of personal
vanity, which hesitated at nothing for its gratification, and which
proved a total failure.

The immensity of the desert landscape, and the absence of any object for
comparison, make these three pyramids seem smaller than they really are;
but the actual height of the largest, that of Cheops, is nearly five
hundred feet. The theory that they are royal tombs is generally
accepted. Bunsen claims for Egypt nearly seven thousand years of
civilization and prosperity before the building of these monuments. We
do not often pause to realize how little of reliable history there is
extant. Conjecture is not history. If contemporary record so often
belies itself, what ought we to consider veracious of that which comes
to us through the shadowy distance of thousands of years? Not many
hundred feet from the nearest pyramid, and on a somewhat lower plane,
stands that colossal mystery, the Sphinx. The Arabs call it "The Father
of Terror," and it certainly has a weird and unworldly look. Its body
and most of the head is hewn out of the solid rock w