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"That was the Holy Crocodile," said Rames abstractedly as he stared at the boiling waters, "which has lived here during the reigns of eight Pharaohs, and perhaps longer. Now we have seen it." "Yes," answered Tua, "and I never want to see it again. Get me away quick, or I will tell your father."
But from the interior of Egypt came characters of quite another stamp; not Greeks, nor Grecized Egyptians, but genuine Copts, speaking the Greek language not at all, or with great difficulty; living half or the whole of their lives in the desert; their very names taken from the heathen gods of the times of the ancient Pharaohs.
The two working people had no idea that their life was becoming too narrow for his young soul, that he wanted to fortify himself with the knowledge to be obtained from the papyrus rolls of the ancient men of wisdom, with the intellectual products of the land of the Pharaohs. And still less did they imagine that a deeper reason led their boy to desire to learn something of life in the world.
Sculptors began by clothing the successors of Alexander in Egyptian garb and transforming them into Pharaohs, just as they had in olden time transformed the Hyksos and the Persians. Works dating from the reigns of the first Ptolemies scarcely differ from those of the best Saïte period, and it is only here and there that we detect traces of Greek influence.
He had no sooner mounted the throne than he commenced preparations for an attack upon the ancient kingdom of the Pharaohs, which, under the dynasty of the Psamatiks, had risen to something of its early greatness, and had been especially wealthy and prosperous under the usurper Amasis.
Nor were the lesser dynasties of the Delta allowed, according to the Stela of Pianchi, to cross the threshold of the Pharaohs because they were unclean and ate fish.
"To this our cities of the dead testify; they occupy a whole region in the western desert. The pyramids testify to it also; they are the tombs of the pharaohs of the ancient kingdom, and the immense tombs which are cut in cliffs for the rulers of our period. "Burial and the tomb are of great importance the very greatest human importance.
And now for Luxor, which in the epoch of the Pharaohs was a suburb of the royal town, and is still its port. It is there, it seems, where we must stop our dahabiya in order to proceed to the fabulous palace which the rising sun has just disclosed to us.
A proof of the religious infatuation, or the blind confidence in destiny, which hurried the Moslem commanders of those days into the most extravagant enterprises, is furnished in the invasion of the once proud empire of the Pharaohs, the mighty, the mysterious Egypt, with an army of merely five thousand men.
All the Pharaohs were there Cheops, Chephrenes, Psammetichus, Sesostri, Amenoteph, all the dark-skinned rulers of the country of the pyramids, and the royal sepulchers; on a still higher platform sat enthroned the kings Chronos, and Xixouthros, who were contemporary with the deluge, and Tubal-Cain, who preceded it.
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