We are to conceive of the pyramid fabric, then, as consisting of these four parts, first the part for whose sake all the rest existed, the pyramid itself, with its concealed passages and its carefully protected sarcophagus-chamber, in which lay the mummy of the king in its granite coffin; then the temple crouching at the foot of the great tomb-chamber; then the long covered causeway leading down to the lower levels, and finally the Portico-temple on the margin of the flooded river. One imagines the scene on the feast-day of a great Pharaoh--the graceful and gaily decorated Egyptian river-skiffs drawing up to the stately columned portico on the river bank, and landing their freight of white-robed priests and gorgeous courtiers and princes of the blood, the preliminary service within the lower temple, and then the solemn procession up the causeway to the temple proper where the memory of Khufu or Khafra is celebrated, and his wants for the other world supplied under the shadow of the mighty mass of stone where the bones of the great builder are laid. The Pyramids are impressive enough to-day in their stripped and gaunt majesty--one wonders if they could be more impressive even in the days of their perfected splendour. Possibly not, but at all events the world can have seen few more imposing sights than an Egyptian Pyramid Field such as that of Gizeh, when its three giants were girt with all the sumptuous fabrics which were part of their essential design as their architects planned them, and without which we are no more seeing them as they were meant to be seen than if we were viewing Salisbury without its spire, or the Duomo of Florence without its campanile. As to the sumptuousness of these subsidiary parts of the pyramid-complex, we have fortunately first-hand evidence. Little remains of the temple proper of the Second Pyramid, though what there is has been completely excavated; but the causeway leading down from it has been traced, and it terminates in a building which has been for long familiar as one of the most striking examples of the combined restraint and magnificence of the Egyptian architects of the early dynasties, the so-called Temple of the Sphinx, which is in reality the Portico-temple of Khafra’s pyramid. With its severely simple architecture of vertical and horizontal lines, its great blocks of stone absolutely without ornament of any sort, and the richness of its granite monoliths and its alabaster wall-surfaces, it tells us something of what must have been the dignity and splendour of the Gizeh Pyramid Field when it stood intact.