While at Cairo he could not, of course, resist the desire of visiting the Pyramids. He therefore hired two Bedouin guides, and proceeded with his friend Forskaal towards the desert, where they were encountered by a young sheïkh, who, by dint of bravado and insolence, succeeded in extorting from them a small sum of money; but had they, when he first offered his services, bestowed upon him half a crown, he would not only have given them no further molestation, but would have constituted himself their protector against all other importunates. Niebuhr afterward returned under more favourable auspices, and completed the measurement of the two great pyramids, the loftier of which he found to be 443 feet, and the second to be 403 feet high. I shall hereafter, perhaps, have occasion to remark upon the strange discrepancies which are found between the measurements of various travellers, which are, in fact, so great, that we must suspect some of them, at least, of having wanted the knowledge required by such an undertaking. From considering the petrifactions and the nature of the rocks in this neighbourhood, Niebuhr was led to infer the prodigious antiquity of Egypt: “Supposing the whole of the rocks in the northern portions of the country to be composed of petrifactions of a certain kind of shell, how many years,” says he, “must have elapsed before a sufficient number of little snails to raise mountains to their present height could have been born and died! How many other years before Egypt could have been drained and become solid, supposing that, in those remote ages, the waters retired from the shore as slowly as they have during the last ten centuries! How many years still, before the country was sufficiently peopled to think of erecting the first pyramid! How many more years, before that vast multitude of pyramids which are still found in the country could have been constructed! Considering that at the present day we are ignorant of when, and by whom, even the most modern of them was built.”