The period of the people’s suffering was divided as follows: ten years in making the causeway along which the blocks were dragged--a work, in my opinion, very little less onerous than that of erecting the pyramid, for its length was five _stadia_, its breadth ten _orgyio_, its greatest height eight, and it was made of cut stone and covered with figures.* Ten years, therefore, were consumed in constructing this causeway and the subterranean chambers hollowed out in the hill.... As for the pyramid itself, twenty years were employed in the making of it.... There are recorded on it, in Egyptian characters, the value of the sums paid in turnips, onions, and garlic, for the labourers attached to the works; if I remember aright, the interpreter who deciphered the inscription told me that the total amounted to sixteen hundred talents of silver. If this were the case, how much must have been expended for iron to make tools, and for provisions and clothing for the workmen?** * Diodorus Siculus declares that there were no causeways to be seen in his time. The remains of one of them appear to have been discovered and restored by Vyse. ** Herodotus, ii. 124, 125. The inscriptions which were read upon the pyramids were the graffiti of visitors, some of them carefully executed. The figures which were shown to Herodotus represented, according to the dragoman, the value of the sums expended for vegetables for the workmen; we ought, probably, to regard them as the thousands which, in many of the votive temples, served to mark the quantities of different things presented to the god, that they might be transmitted to the deceased. The whole resources of the royal treasure were not sufficient for such necessaries: a tradition represents Kheops as at the end of his means, and as selling his daughter to any one that offered, in order to procure money.* Another legend, less disrespectful to the royal dignity and to paternal authority, assures us that he repented in his old age, and that he wrote a sacred book much esteemed by the devout.** * Herodotus, ii. 126. She had profited by what she received to build a pyramid for herself in the neighbourhood of the great one--the middle one of the three small pyramids: it would appear in fact, that this pyramid contained the mummy of a daughter of Kheops, Honîtsonû.