Kings have come and gone, civilizations have bloomed and vanished, the very earth itself has altered since the Pyramids were first built. Whirlwinds have caught up the sands of the desert and used them as a giant sandblast in their attempts to wear away the stone, earthquakes have shattered temples, but on the monuments the forces of Nature have had little effect. The hand of man has wrought more destruction in a few centuries than Nature herself wrought in two or three thousands of years. What man built, man has partly destroyed; yet man, with all his ingenuity for destruction, has done little but touch the outer surface of the Great Pyramid. [Illustration: THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZEH, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD, WITH THE GREAT SPHINX IN THE FOREGROUND, LAPPED BY THE ETERNAL SANDS OF THE DESERT] There are nearly eighty Pyramids of different sizes scattered throughout the Nile valley. The greatest and most renowned is that of King Khufu or Cheops, at Gizeh, which originally measured 355 feet 8 inches at the base, and 481 feet 4 inches in height. The base of the Great Pyramid covers well over 12 acres, and an idea of the size of the monument may be gained when it is known that to walk round it means trudging through the sands for more than half a mile. Over nineteen centuries ago, Julius Cæsar sent from Egypt one of the most famous letters ever written. It was short, but three words: “Veni, Vedi, Veci.” These three words carried a wealth of meaning. They told of a safe journey, of an emperor gazing on the land he was going to conquer, of a successful invasion. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” wrote Cæsar, who in turn was conquered by the beauty of Cleopatra. Who can say what were the thoughts of the Roman emperor as he stood within the shadow of the age-old Pyramids? He was a powerful potentate, but the same thoughts must have flitted through his mind as have surged through the brains of countless unknown men when they first caught sight of the Wonders of the Desert. He must have meditated on their origin, and how they were built. In modern times Napoleon, the greatest soldier the world has ever seen, paced in the shadow of these same Pyramids, and reflected on the eternal questions regarding them. Lord Kitchener, before he attained to fame, gazed on them hundreds of times. The great ones go to their eternal rest, but the Pyramids remain. They were built to endure for all time. The Egyptians looked upon the tomb as their permanent home, which was to last for all eternity. This is the reason for the erection of these mountains of stone, for their solidity of construction, for their gigantic size. They have grown out of Egypt’s religious beliefs. They were built solid and big and strong, so that nothing should overturn them, so that they should defy the hand of Time and Man, and forever provide a resting-place, a home for the shadow-self of the King.