rom
Sicyonia and Tyre to gape at it. Everybody said it was one of the sights
no one could afford to miss. But by and by a piece began to peel off
here and another piece there, and then the nose cracked, and then an ear
dropped off, and then one of the eyes began to get mushy and watery
looking, and finally it was a mere smudge, a false-face, a scarecrow. My
father spent a lot of money trying to fix it up, but what good did it
do? By the time he had the nose cobbled the ears were loose again, and
so on. In the end he gave it up as a bad job.

"Yes; this pyramid has kept me on the jump, but I'm going to stick to it
if it breaks me. Some say I ought to have built it across the river,
where the quarries are. Such gabble makes me sick. Do I look like a man
who would go looking around for such _child's-play_? I hope not. A
one-legged man could have done _that_. Even a Babylonian could have done
it. It would have been as easy as milking a cow. What _I_ wanted was
something that would keep me on the jump--something that would put a
strain on me. So I decided to haul the whole business _across_ the
river--six million tons of rock. And when the engineers said that it
couldn't be done, I gave them two days to get out of Egypt, and then
tackled it myself. It was something new and hard. It was a job I could
get my teeth into.

"Well, I suppose you know what a time I had of it at the start. First I
tried a pontoon bridge, but the stones for the bottom course were so
heavy that they sank the pontoons, and I lost a couple of hundred
niggers before I saw that it couldn't be done. Then I tried a big raft,
but in order to get her to float with the stones I had to use such big
logs that she was unwieldy, and before I knew what had struck me I had
lost six big dressed stones and another hundred niggers. I got the
laugh, of course. Every numskull in Egypt wagged his beard over it; I
could hear the chatter myself. But I kept quiet and stuck to the
problem, and by and by I solved it.

"I suppose you know how I did it. In a general way? Well, the details
are simple. First I made a new raft, a good deal lighter than the old
one, and then I got a thousand water-tight goat-skins and had them blown
up until they were as tight as drums. Then I got together a thousand
niggers who were good swimmers, and gave each of them one of the
blown-up goat-skins. On each goat-skin there was a leather thong, and on
the bottom of the raft, spread over it evenl