"The idea of their antediluvian origin is by no means an unlikely one. As we travel down the past, at every epoch we find the pyramids uplifting their lofty heads into the skies! Still we move down the path of ages, and see the throne of the first mortal king overshadowed by their hoary tops! Farther back, against their bases, beat the receding waves of the deluge; for between the king of the first dynasty and the flood, there seems to be no interval in which they could have been upreared, even if there were time for a nation to rise and advance in power, civilization, art, and wealth, adequate to the product of such gigantic geometric works. Either our chronology is at fault, or the pyramids must have been constructed by the antediluvian demigods, and have outstood the strength of the surging seas which rolled over the earth. You will, however, no doubt, hear all that is to be said, and judge for yourself. "My army is in fine order. You already have learned, by my courier to the queen, how the dark-visaged, barbaric King Occhoris entered Thebes the day of our arrival in the suburbs. Upon receiving intelligence that the van of my forces, which was cavalry, had just reached the sepulchres of the Pharaohs below the city, I pushed forward, joined them, and, at their head, entered the city; while the main body of the troops of the Ethiopian king was moving on from Edfu. But Occhoris had already been driven from his position in the palace of the Pharaohs, by an infuriated and insulted populace. The barbarian monarch, after entering the city without opposition, at the head of two hundred chariots, six hundred horse, and his gigantic body-guard of Bellardines, consisting of a thousand men in iron helmets, round shields, and heavy short-swords, in order to show his contempt of our national religion, here in what has been called both its cradle and its throne, commanded to be led into the temple of the sacred Bull, a wild African buffalo,--a bull of a species as ferocious as the lion,--and ordered him to be let loose against the god. The fierce animal charged upon him as he stood in the holy adytum with his curators, and, overthrowing him, gored him to death in a few moments. Thereupon the priests raised the wild cry of vengeance for sacrilege. It was caught up by the people, and borne from tongue to tongue through the city in a few moments of time. Fearless, indifferent to the arms of the soldiers, the three hundred and seventy priests of the temple, armed only with their sacrificial knives, rushed upon the barbarian and his guard. The Ethiopians rallied about their monarch, and for ten priests they slew, ten-score filled their places. The floor of the temple became a battle-field. Occhoris, and the sixty men who entered the temple with him, formed themselves into a solid phalanx, facing their furious assailants, who seemed to think they could not die. Gaining at length the door, the