Long ages afterwards, when Greek and Roman travellers visited Egypt, and sought to learn her wisdom, they heard an ancient tale concerning the mysterious Phœnix, that came once in five hundred years from the far-off land of spices and perfume to the sacred City of the Sun, where he constructed for himself a funeral pile and perished in the flames, but only to rise again in renewed life and splendour; then, spreading his radiant wings, he took his flight to the distant land from whence he came. What special truth this allegory veiled in the minds of those who told it we can only guess; at the same time it may serve us well as a type of the old ‘wisdom’ itself,[6] which did not perish with its primeval seat, but sprang into renewed and glorious existence in what, to us, is ‘ancient’ Greece—then, lost again when Greece was lost, revived once more in our latter days. But Pa-Ra had a special claim to the veneration of the Egyptians as the birthplace of their sacred literature. Here were written, or, as the priests called it, ‘found,’ the original chapters of the most sacred of the sacred writings, the ‘_Book of the coming forth into the Day_,’[7] which tells of the conflicts and triumphs of the life after death. To secure that triumph, a knowledge of the holy book was required. Portions of it are found written on coffin lids and on the walls of tombs; every Egyptian desired to have it buried with him, and whilst the rich would often have an entire copy laid in his tomb, the poor man coveted at least a fragment. Memphis was founded by the first King of Egypt, but Abydos and On were linked by tradition to the gods. One beautiful obelisk of red granite stands solitary among the green fields to mark where stood the City of the Sun, and the wild bees store their honey in its deep-cut hieroglyphs.