But this same Sphinx by moonlight impressed me more than did anything I saw in the East. Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and photographers and donkey-boys making it cheap and familiar, but at night, when the tourists had gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been paid to keep out of sight, and the moonlight threw the great negro face and the pyramids back of it into shadows of black and lines of silver, and the yellow desert stretched away on either side so empty and silent that I thought I was alone and back two thousand years in the past, discovering the great monuments for myself, and for the first time. Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you must deal with a middle-man in the person of the sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you, and who acts as though the pyramids were his private show, and he was both sole proprietor and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a village near by, and he and his forefathers have always been allowed a monopoly of the pyramids, and distribute their patronage to those guides who will pay them the highest percentage of what they receive from the visitors. You have three men to help you, two to pull, and one to push and to dilate on the view. It takes over ten minutes to climb to the top, with the men jerking at your wrists, and the third man shoving you from below. It is not a difficult feat, and women accomplish it every day, but it leaves you in a breathless state when you reach the summit, and you are stiff above the knees for a day or two after you have come down. When you have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly to give you the idea that you have accomplished something which has often been attempted before, but never so successfully; but you are not deceived, and you do not feel like cheering yourself. The view is worth the climb, however, and the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spreading out over the villages and canals below like a black cloud, impresses you more with its immensity than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher than the top of the Diana on the Madison Square Garden tower. I am sure of this fact, because the man who built the Madison Square Garden assured me of it between breaths on the summit of the pyramid. While you are resting, the thing to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to run down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy sand to the pyramid beyond, and reach its top in eight minutes. When you give the word he disappears with a bound and drops into space, skipping and jumping and growing smaller and smaller as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering handkerchief; and when he reaches the sand he is as small as a child of three, and his ascent of the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon shuffling up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly on his part a sporting thing to do. The descent of the pyramid is very much worse than going up, and you need to go very slowly, and not to look too often at the people crawling about like ants below.