These invaluable letters, written on papyrus in the hieratic character, are in good preservation. They were found in the ruins of Memphis and now form part of the treasures of the Museum of Leyden.[89] They bring home to us with startling nearness the events and actors of the Bible narrative. We see the toilers at their task and the overseers reporting them to the directors of public works. They extract from the quarry those huge blocks which are our wonder to this day. Harnessed to rude sledges, they drag them to the river side and embark them for transport to the opposite bank.[90] Some are so large and so heavy that it takes a month to get them down from the mountain to the landing-place.[91] Other laborers are elsewhere making bricks, digging canals, helping to build the great wall which reached from Pelusium to Heliopolis, and strengthening the defenses not only of Pithom and Rameses but of all the cities and forts between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Their lot is hard; but not harder than the lot of other workmen. They are well fed. They intermarry. They increase and multiply. The season of their great oppression is not yet come. They make bricks, it is true, and those who are so employed must supply a certain number daily;[92] but the straw is not yet withheld, and the task, though perhaps excessive, is not impossible. For we are here on the reign of Rameses II, and the time when Meneptah shall succeed him is yet far distant. It is not till the king dies that the children of Israel sigh, “by reason of the bondage.”