The building of these royal tombs, the pyramids, was the work of a lifetime. A square was first formed, the corners of which were exactly north, south, east, and west; course upon course was added as the years went by, but it could be finished off at any given moment. The angles were then filled in with granite or limestone, fitted with absolute exactness, and the whole sloping surface was beautifully polished. As King Khufu reigned for fifty-seven years, it is no wonder that his sepulchral monument should have attained such gigantic proportions. To form any idea of what the pyramids must once have been, we must restore these polished casing-stones which are now all but gone, and have probably been used in the building of Cairo. Now, ‘their stripped sides present a rude, disjointed appearance,’ but then, the first and second were of ‘brilliant white or yellow limestone, the third all glowing with the red granite from the First Cataract,’ five hundred miles away. ‘Then you must build up or uncover the massive tombs, now broken or choked up with sand, so as to restore the aspect of vast streets of tombs, out of which the Great Pyramid would arise like a cathedral above smaller churches. Lastly, you must enclose two other pyramids with stone precincts and gigantic doorways; and, above all, you must restore the Sphinx as he was in the days of his glory.’[12] Narrow passages lead into the heart of the mighty mass of Khufu’s pyramid, which rises on a base of 764 feet to the height of 480 feet. When the traveller has climbed, or crept, to the centre he finds himself in a chamber, the walls of which are composed of polished red granite. Nothing is left there now to tell of the royal builder but his empty sarcophagus, and his name and titles, amongst other scrawls, written by the masons in red ochre on the walls. Khafra, the successor of Khufu, is made very real to us by the wonderful statue of him which was found uninjured amongst a number of other broken ones of the same monarch, in a deep well near his burial-place. It is of a bright greenish stone, and admirably executed. The king’s features are life-like and benign. A hawk, symbol of Ra, not seen in our illustration, stands behind, and embraces his head with its wings, as if sheltering and protecting the sovereign, who was ‘Son of the Sun.’ Khafra’s pyramid, called by him Ur, or the Great, is second in size only to that of Khufu. On the upper part of it the original casing-stone still remains. The third of the pyramids of Ghizeh, that of Menkaura, though only about half the size of the other two, exceeded them both in costliness and splendour; it was cased from top to bottom in brilliant red granite, exquisitely finished.