very far from Cairo, the modern capital of Egypt, a line of strange,
pointed buildings rises against the sky on the edge of the desert. These
are the Pyramids, the tombs of the great Kings of Egypt in early days,
and if we want to know what Egyptian builders could do 4,000 years
before Christ, we must look at them. Take the largest of them, the Great
Pyramid, called the Pyramid of Cheops. Cheops is really Khufu, the King
who was so much put out by Dedi's prophecy about Rud-didet's three
babies. No such building was ever reared either before or since. It
stands, even now, 450 feet in height, and before the peak was destroyed,
it was about 30 feet higher. Each of its four sides measures over 750
feet in length, and it covers more than twelve acres of ground, the size
of a pretty large field. But you will get the best idea of how
tremendous a building it is when I tell you that if you used it as a
quarry, you could build a town, big enough to hold all the people of
Aberdeen, out of the Great Pyramid; or if you broke up the stones of
which it is built, and laid them in a line a foot broad and a foot deep,
the line would reach a good deal more than halfway round the world at
the Equator. You would have some trouble in breaking up the stones,
however; for many of the great blocks weigh from 40 to 50 tons apiece,
and they are so beautifully fitted to one another that you could not get
the edge of a sheet of paper into the joints!

Inside this great mountain of stone there are long passages leading to
two small rooms in the centre of the Pyramid; and in one of these rooms,
called "the King's Chamber," the body of the greatest builder the world
has ever seen was laid in its stone coffin. Then the passages were
closed with heavy plug-blocks of stone, so that no one should ever
disturb the sleep of King Khufu. But, in spite of all precautions,
robbers mined their way into the Pyramid ages ago, plundered the coffin,
and scattered to the winds the remains of the King, so that, as Byron
says, "Not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops."

The other pyramids are smaller, though, if the Great Pyramid had not
been built, the Second and Third would have been counted world's
wonders. Near the Second Pyramid sits the Great Sphinx. It is a huge
statue, human-headed and lion-bodied, carved out of limestone rock. Who
carved it, or whose face it bears, we do not certainly know; but there
the great figure crouches, as it has crouched for countless a