We engaged donkeys, at last, after there had been several fights over us, and set out up the road to the Great Pyramid, assailed every little way by bandits lying in wait. The Great Pyramid does not improve with close acquaintance. It has been too much damaged by time and criminal assault. It loses its clean-cut outlines as you come near and becomes little more than a stupendous heap of stones. I think we were a trifle disappointed with a close inspection, to tell the truth, for even the largest pictures do not give one quite the impression of the reality. It was as if we had been gazing at some marvellous painting, and then had walked up very near to see how the work was done. The charm came back as we rode off a little and turned to view it now and again in the evening light. The irregularities disappeared; the outlines became clean against the sky; I was no longer disappointed in that giant of architecture whose shadow (it lay now just at our feet) began marking time at a period when the world had no recorded history. Yet in one or two respects the reality differed from the dream. Usually stone grows gray with age and takes on moss and lichen--the mould of time. The Pyramids are entirely bare, and they are not gray. The stones might have been laid up yesterday so far as any vegetable increment is concerned, and their color is a tawny gold--luminous gold in the sunset, like the barren hills beyond. The daily sandblast of the desert will level these monuments in time, no doubt, but the last fragment in that remote age will still be bare and in color unchanged. As with the Pyramids, our first impression of the Sphinx was one of disappointment. It seemed small to us. It is small compared with a pyramid, while the photographs give one another idea. The photographs are made with the Sphinkis (Sphinx, I mean--one falls so easily into the native speech) in the foreground, looking fully as big as the second-size pyramid and quite able to have the third-size pyramid for breakfast. Figures mean nothing in the face of a picture like that; you comprehend them, but you do not realize them--visualize them, perhaps I ought to say. So the Sphinx seemed small to us as we approached, and even when we were on the immediate brink of sand, gazing down upon it, its sixty-five feet of stature seemed reduced from the image in our minds. [Illustration: A VAST INDIFFERENCE TO ALL PUNY THINGS]