The mighty Pyramids seem to stand quite near to Cairo, and still it takes an hour and a half to drive to them by a long avenue of great trees with meeting branches, stately leafy veterans, whose thick tops, forming a cool vault, prevented the sun from scorching us when we drove on the Ismail Road that leads from Cairo to the Pyramids. We crossed an iron bridge over the Nile, which, though at its fullest now, is not very deep; a drove of buffaloes were crossing it easily. We passed through the mud-built village of Sakhara, a small encampment with a cluster of nomad tents, and saw a circle of Arab-Bedouins, cloaked and white hooded forms, belonging to a nomad tribe, crouching over a fire and cooking their dinner in the plain, under the scanty shade of palm-trees. Their Sheikh, a very tall and dignified Arab, offered us a camel and a donkey to go and see the Sphinx. Sergy mounted the camel and I had to condescend to the donkey. We were followed by a band of Bedouins who offered us their services as guides to the Pyramids. Our escort increased as we went on; half-naked children ran after us begging baksheesh. Directly after leaving the village we were in the Sahara, with no tree or habitation, only the naked desert with rippling sandbanks. The landscape fatigued the eye by its sand uniformly yellow and its sky uniformly blue. The Pyramids, the greatest of all human monuments, bewildered us by their size when we drove up to them, especially the Pyramid of Cheops, which took a hundred thousand masons twenty-five years to build. The Pyramids are of extreme antiquity, a thousand years before the Christian era. At the time when Abraham undertook his journey to Egypt, the Pyramids had already existed for several centuries back. As soon as a Pharaoh began to reign, in the first place he had his mausoleum built in the form of a Pyramid. Inside, rooms with alabaster walls are shown, and long high galleries containing the huge granite sarcophaguses. We made the tour of the great Pyramid of Cheops. Its blocks consist of a series of steep stone steps. To go up these steps is like walking up a wall. The hard African sun was shining fiercely and it was too hot to undertake the ascent of the Pyramid; we were contented to contemplate its wonders from the base. A young Bedouin proposed to show us a wonderful feat—his ascent and descent of the Pyramid in nineteen minutes, but we refused to witness that acrobatic performance and rode over the hot yellow sand of the desert to the Sphinx. All around us the great plain extended to the horizon. I was oppressed by the immense solitude. In the desert, in the midst of the sand-ocean, the monstrous Sphinx, the colossus of the past ages, keeps watch on the sands from nearly four thousand years before the birth of Christ, sleeping his eternal and enigmatic sleep. How many centuries have past, and this giant continues contemplating, with a mysterious and condescending smile, the nothingness and instability of the world.