On top of the actual grave where the mummy rested, he constructed a pile of bricks which rose several hundred feet into the air. A small passage-way gave entrance to the vault and when this passage was closed with a heavy slab of granite the mummy was safe from all intrusion. The King of course could not allow one of his subjects to outdo him in such a matter. He was the most powerful man of all Egypt who lived in the biggest house and therefore he was entitled to the best grave. What others had done in brick he could do with the help of more costly materials. Pharaoh sent his officers far and wide to gather workmen. He constructed roads. He built barracks in which the workmen could live and sleep (you may see those barracks this very day). Then he set to work and made himself a grave which was to endure for all time. We call this great pile of masonry a "pyramid." The origin of the word is a curious one. When the Greeks visited Egypt the Pyramids were already several thousand years old. [Illustration: THE MUMMY] Of course the Egyptians took their guests into the desert to see these wondrous sights just as we take foreigners to gaze at the Wool-worth Tower and Brooklyn Bridge. The Greek guest, lost in admiration, waved his hands and asked what the strange mountains might be. His guide thought that he referred to the extraordinary height and said "Yes, they are very high indeed." The Egyptian word for height was "pir-em-us." The Greek must have thought that this was the name of the whole structure and giving it a Greek ending he called it a "pyramis." We have changed the "s" into a "d" but we still use the same Egyptian word when we talk of the stone graves along the banks of the Nile. The biggest of these many pyramids, which was built fifty centuries ago, was five hundred feet high. At the base it was seven hundred and fifty-five feet wide. It covered more than thirteen acres of desert, which is three times as much space as that occupied by the church of Saint Peter, the largest edifice of the Christian world. During twenty years, over a hundred thousand men were used to carry the stones from the distant peninsula of Sinai--to ferry them across the Nile (how they ever managed to do this we do not understand)--to drag them halfway across the desert and finally hoist them into their correct position. But so well did Pharaoh's architects and engineers perform their task that the narrow passage-way which leads to the royal tomb in the heart of the pyramid has never yet been pushed out of shape by the terrific weight of those thousands and thousands of tons of stone which press upon it from all sides. THE MAKING OF A STATE Nowadays we all are members of a "state." We may be Frenchmen or Chinamen or Russians; we may live in the furthest corner of Indonesia (do you know where that is?), but in some way or other we belong to that curious combination of people which is called the "state."