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Updated: May 16, 2025
The immensity of the desert landscape, and the absence of any object for comparison, make these three pyramids seem smaller than they really are; but the actual height of the largest, that of Cheops, is nearly five hundred feet. The theory that they are royal tombs is generally accepted.
Outside came a rather hard, brown protective sheath; then the main body of the gall, of firm and dense tissue; and finally, at the heart, like the Queen's chamber in Cheops, the irregular little dwelling-place of the grub.
For the benefit of those among the untravelled English who have not yet broken a soda-water bottle against the Sphinx, or eaten sandwiches to the immortal memory of Cheops, it may be as well to explain that the Mena House Hotel is a long, rambling, roomy building, situated within five minutes' walk of the Great Pyramid, and happily possessed of a golfing-ground and a marble swimming- bath.
Each side of the Pyramid of Cheops is about as long as the Capitol at Washington, or the Sultan's new palace on the Bosporus, and is longer than the greatest depth of St. Peter's at Rome which is to say that each side of Cheops extends seven hundred and some odd feet. It is about seventy-five feet higher than the cross on St. Peter's.
Some members of the royal family of Cheops were buried in swathed wrapping, lying extended on the left side with the knees bent. During the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties this extended position on the side becomes customary for the better classes; and during the Middle Empire it becomes almost universal.
The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust. Its neatness rebuked the street.
It may be very interesting for learned men and antiquarians thus to search every corner; but for a woman like myself, brought hither only by an insatiable desire to travel, and capable of judging of the beauties of nature and art only by her own simple feelings, it was enough to have ascended the pyramid of Cheops, and to have seen something of its interior.
"If the gods, instead of making me the youngest son of his holiness, had made me a pharaoh, like Ramses the Great, I would conquer nine nations, of which people in Egypt have never heard mention; I would build a temple larger than all Thebes, and rear for myself a pyramid near which the tomb of Cheops would be like a rosebush at the side of a full-grown palm-tree."
The world must have seemed very ancient to the Egyptians fifteen hundred years before Christ, when the Pyramid of Cheops was a relic of antiquity, when almost the whole circle of arts, sciences, and literature had been run through, when every nation within reach had been conquered, when woman had been developed into one of the most fascinating of beings, and even reigned more absolutely than Elizabeth or Victoria has reigned since: it was a pretty tired old world at that time.
This is the largest of all, built anything between 5000 and 6000 years ago, as the tomb of King Cheops. He built it for himself by cruel forced labour crushed out of starving men; he intended that his body should lie like the kernel of a nut in this mighty shell. As we pass beyond it we see another, farther off in the desert sand, and yet another.
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