Passing by the Abu Roash pyramid of King Razedef, we begin our survey with the magnificent group of Gizeh, which to the ordinary man are the Pyramids to the exclusion of all others. Everyone knows, of course, what the Pyramids are like, and has some rough idea of their surpassing size, and perhaps the only way to impress the sense of their vastness on the mind is to use one or other of the comparisons which have been worked out to illustrate the stupendous scale on which they are built. To tell the reader that the weight of the stones built into the Great Pyramid is over six million tons is merely to bewilder him; the vastness of the business may be better appreciated when one realises that a town of the size of Aberdeen might be built out of the materials which Khufu gathered together for his monstrous tomb, or that if the stones were divided into blocks a foot square, and these blocks placed end to end in a straight line, the line would be long enough to reach two-thirds of the length of the circumference of the earth at the Equator. [Illustration: 6. GREAT PYRAMID AND SPHINX, WITH PART OF TEMPLE OF THE SPHINX.] Khufu’s pyramid was originally about 481 feet in height, and each of its sides measured at the base a matter of 755 feet 8 inches, and these long lines were laid out and built with such wonderful accuracy that the maximum error is not more than an inch. “The laying out of the base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu,” says Professor Sir W. M. F. Petrie, “is a triumph of skill; its errors, both in length and in angles, could be covered by placing one’s thumb on them; and to lay out a square of more than a furlong in the side (and with rock in the midst of it, which prevented any diagonal checks being measured) with such accuracy shows surprising care. The work of the casing stones which remain is of the same class; the faces are so straight and so truly square, that when the stones were built together the film of mortar left between them is on an average not thicker than one’s thumb-nail, though the joint is a couple of yards long; and the levelling of them over long distances has not any larger errors.” “Equal to optician’s work of the present day,” says the same authority elsewhere, “but on a scale of acres instead of feet or yards of material.”