It has been truly remarked by Volney, that on arriving any foreign country, how many descriptions soever you may have read of it, you nevertheless find every thing new and strange; as if, in fact, you had just discovered it. Denon was precisely in this predicament. He had, no doubt, read what had been written respecting Egypt; yet he looked upon it as a country of which little beyond the name was known in Europe, and consequently commenced the study of its antiquities with all possible enthusiasm. His views, though vanity had some influence in the formation of them, were tolerably correct. Egypt has indeed been often visited, and in many instances by able men and accomplished scholars; but no one who has toiled, as I have, through the descriptions of these various travellers, can avoid making the discovery that very much remains yet to be done before we can be said to possess a thorough knowledge of Egypt, ancient or modern. From Alexandria Denon proceeded with Kleber’s division towards Rosetta; clouds of Arabs hung on their front and in their rear, cutting off every man who lagged behind, or strayed to the distance of fifty yards from the main body. Desaix himself narrowly escaped; and several young officers, less on the alert, were either made prisoners or shot. After making numerous little excursions in the Delta, he set out for Upper Egypt, which, in his opinion, had never before been visited by a European; so that, if we interpret him literally, all the travellers who had previously described that country were so many fiction-mongers. In ascending the Nile, he beheld at ten leagues’ distance from Cairo the points of the Pyramids piercing the horizon. These prodigious monuments, which, even more powerfully than Thebes itself, command the attention of every traveller in Egypt, he soon visited with an escort, and sketched from various positions. The city of Cairo disappointed his expectations, which appear to have been absurd, since he had formed his ideas of the place from the “Arabian Nights,” rather than from the descriptions of travellers.