On the 7th of April, I and Erbkam accompanied the prince to the pyramids, and first to those of Gizeh. The pyramid of Cheops was ascended, and the inside visited; the beautiful tomb of Prince Merhet I had had laid open for the purpose of showing it. Then we left for our camp at Saqâra. Here we heard that a barefaced robbery had been committed in Abeken’s tent the night before. While he was asleep, with a light burning, after his return from Cairo, his knapsack, pistols, and a few other matters lying about, were stolen; as the thief was departing, a noise was perceived by the guard, but the darkness precluded all pursuit. After the prince had inspected the most beautiful tomb of Saqâra, we rode across the plain to Mitrahinneh to visit the mound of Memphis, and the half-buried colossus of Ramses Miamun (Sesostris), the face of which is almost perfectly preserved.[24] Late at night, we arrived again in Cairo, after sixteen hours of motion, scarcely interrupted by short pauses of rest; the unusual fatigue, however, rather raised the lively taste for travelling in the prince’s mind than otherwise. The next day the mosques of the city were visited, which are partly worthy of notice for their magnificence, and are partly of interest in the history of mediæval art on account of the earliest specimen of the general application of the pointed arch. The questions touching this characteristic architectural branch of the so-called Gothic style had employed me so much some years ago, that I could not avoid pursuing the old traces; the pointed arch is found in the oldest mosques up to the ninth century. With the conquest of Sicily by the Arabs, this form of the arch was carried over to the island, where the next conquerors, the Normans, found it in the eleventh century, and were led to employ it much. To deny some historical connection between the Norman pointed arch of Palermo and our northern style appears to me to be impossible; the admission of such a connection would certainly render it more difficult to explain of the sporadically but not lawlessly used rows of pointed arches which occur in the cathedral of Naumburg in the eleventh century, and at Memleben already in the tenth. The theorists will not yet admit this; but I must await the confutation of these reasons.[25] The Nilometer on the island of Roda, which we visited after the mosques, also contains a row of pointed arches, which belong to the original building, going back to the ninth century, as the carefully-examined Kufic inscriptions testify.