"Then you believe that there were giants in the earth in the days before the flood?" I said, doubtingly. "These pyramids attest the fact," he replied, with an impressive gesture of his right hand towards the opposite one. "Noah himself, says tradition, and his sons, Chephres, Chufu, and Amun or Men-Cherines, were gigantic, and are worshipped as gods, as you know, not only here and in Syria and Ethiopia, but in the Orient, and beyond the seas, under various names. In the third pyramid Amun was entombed. In the second is Chephres, or Chefret, who, when an aged king, was brought from the place where he died, and placed in a sarcophagus above the chamber where lay the king who found sepulture there before the flood. Within the pyramid on which we are, rest the sacred bones of the Prince-god Noah, who, at the age of nine hundred and fifty years, came hither to be buried by the side of his eldest son Chephres. 'Such a mourning of the nations, all of whom sprung from his loins, the earth never knew, and will never witness more,' say the sacred scrolls of the temples. All kings, and queens, and princes, and lords, and nobles, of every realm followed the embalmed body of their father and deity; and King Menes, his grandson, went up from Egypt with all the hosts of the land to meet the funeral procession, and to receive the divine body. Cheops is but another name for Noah. Here also is entombed Menes." Such, my dear mother, is the priestly tradition of the pyramids. We, of Tyre, have a myth that the Father of the Flood is buried in Damascus; but though Egyptians love to concentrate all history around their own land, and make Egypt the cradle of the human race, yet as this tradition seems to be better founded than ours, and as they can point to the grand tombs of these kings of the flood, I am ready to concede to her the honor which she claims of being the place of sepulture of the giants who survived the deluge. And what fitter tombs, than these eternal mountains of granite, could the progenitors of the race repose in! Fit sepulchres are these in their grandeur of proportions, for men whose stature was gigantic, and whose lives extended through a thousand years! But I must return to the prospect from the summit of this mausoleum of giants. The sun was near the horizon, and sent his level and mingled rose, golden, and purple beams aslant across the valley. The air was perfectly clear, and our view unimpeded in all directions. To the south, along the verdant plain of the Nile, the pyramids shone in the sun as if sheathed with plates of gold. Palms, temples, obelisks in pairs, and pylones were mingled with them in the richest confusion; while as far as the eye could penetrate they receded into the desert, till their size was diminished by distance to shining mounds.