"There is no doubt whatever, O Sesostris," said their father, who had listened to the tradition as he sat in his ivory chair, in the rich undress vestments he wore when not engaged in official acts in the temple, "or rather, we of the priesthood do not doubt, that the pyramids, at least the pair so nearly of a size and so close together, were builded before the deluge, which, according to our astrologers, took place under the dynasty of the demigods, about one thousand five hundred and forty years ago, when the world was nearly two thousand four hundred years old; but our books of mysteries give many more thousands of years! In the most ancient temple of Thoth, at Thebes, which is the true astronomical capital of the kingdom, as well as the ecclesiastical one, there is a tablet in the ceiling of the adytum, representing the configuration of the seven planets as they existed on the first day after the creation. This was the beginning of the world, and since that day the heavenly bodies have not stood thus again! Upon the wall beneath it is a _stele_, portraying their position at the time of the Noachic deluge. The arc of their celestial motion, between the creation and the deluge, being accurately measured in the progress of centuries, by astrologers of the houses of the mysteries, compared with the arc measured for one thousand years since the deluge, shows that the fixed stars, between the creation and the deluge, moved thirty spaces of the thousand years along the zodiac westward. That is, the arc of the zodiac was thirty times as large between the creation and deluge, as between the deluge and the end of a thousand years after it; while the seven planets changed their places in the same proportions of time and change. Hence, guided by the march of the heavenly bodies, they teach that thirty thousand years elapsed between the creation and the deluge; since it would take that time to change the configuration of the stars so greatly as to subtend so vast an arc as their precession drew along the zodiacal path! But, as I have said, the sacred books of the priests, who are governed only by the planetary constellations, aided by tradition, give the number of years I have previously stated." "Do not the Egyptian astrologers," I asked, "give a period for a year of the heavens to make one revolution through the zodiac?" "It is one of their mysteries. Finishing upon a chart the arc of precession which they measure on the zodiac they measure the whole circle it will sweep, and calculate a cycle or period of thirty-six thousand years, as the duration of one grand year of the universe!" "As, then, thirty thousand years of this year of the stars passed before the deluge, if the astrologers are correct in their sidereal calculations," I remarked, "there are but four thousand and four hundred and fifty years to the end of the first celestial year of creation!"