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Bet you he's well-known in society as a kleptomaniac. Bet you that when his name is announced his friends pick up their spoons and send in a hurry call to police headquarters for a squad to come and see that he doesn't sneak the front door. Of course he meant to steal it! He has a museum of his own down in the country. My Cheops is going to lend tone to that.
They are without doubt the greatest masses ever built by man. Cheops is four hundred and fifty feet high, and covers thirteen acres at the base, tapering to the top, which is only about thirty feet square, where one false step would be certain death, as, contrary to my opinion at first, I saw that one in falling could not possibly rest on any of the layers of projecting stone.
And first there is the pyramid of Cheops, whose immutable base we had to skirt on our way hither. In the moonlight we could see the separate blocks, so enormous, so regular, so even in their layers, which lie one above the other to infinity, getting ever smaller and smaller, and mounting, mounting in diminishing perspective, until at last high up they form the apex of this giddy triangle.
Poor Cheops is enshrined in a pyramid-shaped box, in which he is often shown and his life-history told to interested visitors. Of all the varieties of "creeping things" spiders seem to be the most universally disliked.
A cypress marks the place, to my fancy, Here a hope made up its mind that it was not worth while to hope any longer, and foundered in its tracks. There is an ambition, unburied, to be sure, but as dead as Cheops. "Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans, and phantom hopes."
Great clumsy time shall stumble and dance, who liked to kill little children, and can hurt even the daisies no longer. Then shall our children laugh at him who slew Babylon's winged bulls, and smote great numbers of the gods and fairies when he is shorn of his hours and his years. We will shut him up in the Pyramid of Cheops, in the great chamber where the sarcophagus is.
They are excellently well adapted for the purpose, and in that country a good supply of ice is a desideratum. Indeed, if my plan meets with half the success it deserves, the antiquaries two centuries hence will conclude that ice was the original use of those structures." "Shade of Cheops, forbid!" I exclaimed. "Cheops be hanged!" returned my irreverent companion.
But, in spite of all precautions, robbers mined their way into the Pyramid ages ago, plundered the coffin, and scattered to the winds the remains of the King, so that, as Byron says, "Not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops." The other pyramids are smaller, though, if the Great Pyramid had not been built, the Second and Third would have been counted world's wonders.
In this general office they stand together: both wear, in our eyes, the regal purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole modus operandi, of their architecture, they stand apart toto coelo.
It is estimated that this mighty monument, which Abraham may have looked upon, contains enough stone to build a wall around the frontier of France. Of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Pyramid of Cheops alone remains. The other attractions here are the Granite Temple, and some tombs, from one of which a jackal ran away as we were approaching.
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