It was part of the punishment of Mykerinos that he should lose his daughter, and the dragomen thus managed to connect the pyramid at Gizeh with a gilded wooden image of a cow in the palace at Sais, which, since the reign of Psammetikhos, must have been well-known to them. The cow, which was really a symbol of Neit in the form of Hathor, with what Herodotos supposed to be the disk of the sun between its horns, though it was really the moon, was imagined to be hollow, and to be the coffin of the daughter of the Pharaoh. The wooden figures which stood beside it were further imagined to represent the concubines of the king. There were, however, other stories about both the figures and the cow, less reputable to the royal character, but equally showing how entirely ignorant Herodotos’s informants were of Egyptian religion and custom. Though they knew that at the festival of Osiris the cow was carried out into the open air, they said this was because the daughter of Mykerinos when dying had asked her father that she might once a year see the sun. Can there be a stronger proof of the gulf that existed between the native Egyptian and the “impure” stranger, even when the latter belonged to the caste of dragomen? To us the representation of Hathor under the form of a cow with the lunar orb between its horns seems an elementary fact of ancient Egyptian religion; the modern tourist sees it depicted time after time on the walls of temples and tombs, and the modern dragoman has begun to learn something about its meaning. But in the fifth century before our era the dragoman and the tourist were alike foreigners, who were not permitted to penetrate within the temples, and there were neither books nor teachers to instruct them in the doctrines of the Egyptian faith. Herodotos must have returned to Memphis after his visit to the pyramids, before setting forth on his voyage to the south. Had he gone straight from Gizeh to the Fayyûm along the edge of the desert, he would have passed the step-pyramid and the Serapeum at Saqqâra. It is difficult to believe that, had he done so, he would have told us nothing about the burial-place of the sacred bulls and the huge sarcophagi of granite in which they were entombed. The subterranean gallery begun by Psammetikhos was still open, and each Apis as he died was buried in it down to the end of the Ptolemaic period. At a later date, when the Persian empire had been overthrown, the Serapeum became a favourite place of pilgrimage for Greek visitors to Memphis. A Greek temple was built over the sepulchres of the bulls, Greek recluses took up their abode in its chambers, and Greek tourists inscribed their names on the sphinxes which lined the approach to the sanctuary.