The first glimpse that most travelers now get of the pyramids is from the window of the railway carriage as they come from Alexandria; and it is not impressive. It does not take one’s breath away, for instance, like a first sight of the Alps from the high level of the Neufchâtel line, or the outline of the Acropolis at Athens as one first recognizes it from the sea. The well-known triangular forms look small and shadowy, and are too familiar to be in any way startling. And the same, I think, is true of every distant view of them--that is, of every view which is too distant to afford the means of scaling them against other objects. It is only in approaching them, and observing how they grow with every foot of the road, that one begins to feel they are not so familiar after all. But when at last the edge of the desert is reached, and the long sand-slope climbed, and the rocky platform gained, and the great pyramid in all its unexpected bulk and majesty towers close above one’s head, the effect is as sudden as it is overwhelming. It shuts out the sky and the horizon. It shuts out all the other pyramids. It shuts out everything but the sense of awe and wonder. Now, too, one discovers that it was with the forms of the pyramids, and only their forms, that one had been acquainted all these years past. Of their surface, their color, their relative position, their number (to say nothing of their size), one had hitherto entertained no kind of definite idea. The most careful study of plans and measurements, the clearest photographs, the most elaborate descriptions, had done little or nothing, after all, to make one know the place beforehand. This undulating table-land of sand and rock, pitted with open graves and cumbered with mounds of shapeless masonry, is wholly unlike the desert of our dreams. The pyramids of Cheops and Chephren are bigger than we had expected; the pyramid of Mycerinus is smaller. Here, too, are nine pyramids, instead of three. They are all entered in the plans and mentioned in the guide-books; but, somehow, one is unprepared to find them there, and cannot help looking upon them as intruders. These six extra pyramids are small and greatly dilapidated. One, indeed, is little more than a big cairn. Even the great pyramid puzzles us with an unexpected sense of unlikeness. We all know and have known from childhood, that it was stripped of its outer blocks some five hundred years ago to build Arab mosques and palaces; but the rugged, rock-like aspect of that giant staircase takes us by surprise, nevertheless. Nor does it look like a partial ruin either. It looks as if it had been left unfinished, and as if the workmen might be coming back to-morrow morning. The color again is a surprise. Few persons can be aware beforehand of the rich tawny hue that Egyptian limestone assumes after ages of exposure to the blaze of an Egyptian sky. Seen in certain lights, the pyramids look like piles of massy gold.