"Originally the pyramid had a sharp apex, but it has been torn away, so that the top is now an irregular platform, about thirty feet square, and makes a comfortable resting-place after the fatigue of the ascent. We were tired enough when we got there, and quite willing to sit down. The Arabs kept bothering us for money, and would give us no peace till we told the men who accompanied us that we would give them a good backsheesh on condition that they kept all the rest away from us, and if they failed to do so they would not have a penny. The plan worked very fairly, but did not save us altogether from annoyance. "We were disappointed with the view from the top, and this is said to be the case with most travellers. There was the desert on one side, and the rich Valley of the Nile on the other; to the eastward, and across the river, were the walls of Cairo, with the Mokattam and other hills behind it; on the south was the valley of the river, with the double line of desert closing in upon it; while to the north was the Delta, spreading out toward the Mediterranean, and contrasting sharply with the clear blue sky above it. [Illustration: THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS.--"FORTY CENTURIES LOOK DOWN ON YOU."] "The walls and domes and minarets of Cairo gave an Oriental aspect to the view in that direction, and told us, if nothing else had been needed to do so, that we were in the land of the Moslem. But the most noticeable thing in the landscape was the contrast between the desert and the Delta--between the most fertile soil in the world and the most barren. There is no middle ground; at one place lies the richest of all rich earths, and six inches away it is the driest and most unproductive sand. You may sit at the dividing line, and while you rest one hand on the dark green carpet of grass growing from the black alluvium, you can gather the gray sand with the other. It is the perfection of fertility on one side, and the perfection of desolation on the other. Probably there is not, nor can there be, anywhere else in the world a sharper contrast in a picture drawn by nature. "The Doctor had a magnifying-glass in his pocket, and we looked at some of the sand with it. It is not composed of angular fragments with sharp corners, such as you will see in the sand which you dig from the ground at home, but every particle is worn as smooth as the marbles that boys play with, or as the 'cobble-stones' with which our streets are paved. Many centuries of attrition under the winds of Africa have done the work. "Do you want to know how large the Great Pyramid is? "Well, it is about seven hundred and forty feet square, and four hundred and eighty feet high. It covers an area of nearly thirteen acres, and contains eighty-nine million cubic feet of stone. What do you suppose you could do with that amount of stone? [Illustration: EGYPTIAN CAPTIVES EMPLOYED AT HARD LABOR.]