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The Sakhara itself is a regular octagon of about sixty feet a side, and is entered by four spacious doors, each of which is adorned with a porch projecting from the line of the building and rising considerably on the wall. All the sides of it are paneled.
I dreaded the first excursion. It was to Memphis and Sakhara, eighteen miles in all, and I never had been on a donkey in my life. I am not afraid of horses, but donkeys are so much like mules. My friends encouraged me all they could.
Within the same enclosure there is another house of prayer called El Aksa, which, though a fine building, is greatly inferior to El Sakhara. Between the two there is a beautiful fountain, which takes its name from a clump of orange-trees overshadowing its water. The mosque is composed of seven naves supported by pillars and columns, and at the head of the centre nave is a fine cupola.
Thus have I to bear the sins of Mohammed Ali, my perfidious donkey-boy, who forced me to lead the van on that dreadful first day at Sakhara. Everywhere you go you hear the insistent, importunate cry for backsheesh. Old men, women, children, dragomans, guides, merchants, and street-venders all sorts and conditions of men beg for it. They teach even babies to take hold of your dress and cry for it.
A firman granting such privileges would be regarded as a most horrid sacrilege: it would not be respected by the people; and the favoured object would inevitably become the victim of his own imprudent boldness. In the interior of the rock whereon the Sakhara stands there is a cave, into which Dr. Richardson could not obtain admittance.
It is still manufactured in the East into amulets, and worn as a specific against the plague; and that a similar superstition existed in regard to this stone in very early ages is rendered manifest by the circumstance, that charms made of the same substance were found in the subterranean chambers under the pyramids of Sakhara in Upper Egypt.
Beyond this, other mountains rise from the gulf, many of which resemble the Step Pyramid at Sakhara, one of the oldest of the royal sepulchres beside the Nile. But so immeasurably vaster are the pyramids of this Cañon than any work of man, that had the tombs of the Pharaohs been placed beside them, I could not have discovered them without a field-glass.
My second singer was a beetle an awkward, enormous, serious, brilliant beetle, with six-inch antennæ and great wing covers, which combined the hues of the royal robes of Queen Thi, tempered by thousands of years of silent darkness in the underground tombs at Sakhara, with the grace of curve and angle of equally ancient characters on the hill tombs of Fokien.
The group of pyramids of Ghizeh and at Sakhara in Egypt; the triangular pyramid of the Queen of the Scythians, Zarina, which was a stadium high and three in circumference, and which was decorated with a colossal figure; the fourteen Etruscan pyramids, which are said to have been enclosed in the labyrinth of the king Porsenna, at Clusium were reared to serve as the sepulchres of the illustrious dead.
In Persia opium is usually smoked in secret dens, for there the habit is considered shameful, but in China both men and women smoke openly. The sugar-cane is also grown over immense fields in India. The juice contains 20 per cent of sugar. In Sanscrit, the old language of India, it is called sakhara. The Arabs, who introduced it to the Mediterranean coasts, called it sukhar.
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