t before the birth of Moses,--yes, before
Jacob came down with his sons to Egypt,--and it is possible that Joseph
pointed out the same to his aged father as a proof of the greatness of
the country and its resources.

[Illustration: MOHAMMEDAN MOSQUE.]

According to Herodotus one hundred and twenty thousand men were occupied
twenty years in building it. Its base covers about eleven acres, and its
height is about four hundred and eighty feet. One can get an approximate
idea of the enormous mass of material in it, when it is calculated that
it contains stone enough to build a wall one and a-half feet thick and
ten feet high around all England,--a distance of nearly nine hundred
miles.

The renowned Sphinx is hewn out of the solid rock. It is in a reclining
position, and, although partly buried by sand, I could easily trace its
back for a distance of thirty paces.

At the foot of the pyramid I met an Arabian chief, a gesture from whom
showed me that he belonged to the mystic brotherhood of Free Masons,
which gave rise to warm handshaking, and an interesting conversation
through the aid of my interpreter. In pressing the hand of this son of
the desert sighing under despotism, and reading the feelings of his
heart through the wrinkles of his face, while he talked of the great
country in the West, whence I came, and whose free institutions,
granting equal rights to all, were to him a heavenly light pointing
forward and upward, I felt more deeply than ever before what a blessing
it is to be a citizen of a commonwealth where a man is measured, not by
his birth or his wealth, but by his own personal merits.

[Illustration: THE PYRAMIDS AND THE SPHINX.]

Returning to Cairo the remainder of the day was spent in the Boulak
museum, among the most wonderful antiquities of the world. Shortly
before there had been discovered in the Nubian hills, beneath the temple
Dayr-el-Baheree, a burial place containing the bodies of the old
Egyptian kings. These had been brought to Cairo, where a separate wing
of the museum had been opened for their keeping, and there they lay in
their coffins in a fine state of preservation, owing to the Egyptian
method of embalming. There were the very men who built the pyramids;
there was Amases I., the founder of the new empire, Thotmes III., the
great Sethi I., and his famous son Ramses II., and that Pharaoh who is
supposed to have brought up Moses; there was also his daughter Mirrhis,
who afterward beca