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On the Pyramids 313
Falls of Niagara or the Dam of Assuan, and you can see
the great pyramids of Gizeh, which to most people stand
for all the pyramids, from any eminence in Cairo.
There are dozens of other pyramids—from Hehvan, near
Cairo, you can see five groups of pyramids. Near Cairo
alone, you can ride from pyramid to pyramid for seventy
miles on end, without ever being out of sight of pyramids.
These constitute the most northerly " pyramid field."
There is a field of tall, slender pyramids as far south as
Merawi, which is in the Sudan, at no great distance from
Khartum. And we climbed a curious mud pyramid, supposed
to have been built by the Israelites, in the Faylam. I photographed
one of its mud bricks, half a yard or two feet long,
which showed the straw so plainly that it came out in the
kodak, so it must have been built before the Israelites were
asked to make bricks without straw.
What were my first impressions of the Pyramids ? They
began on my first evening in Cairo, when a fiery Egyptian
sunset lured me to the Citadel.
You don't need to go to the Pyramids to be familiar with
their comic side, for it has been so inimitably described with
pen and paint-brush by Mr. Lance Thackeray—the John
Leech of tourist life in Egypt. You can see people
climbing the Great Pyramid as they do climb it, shovelled
up by the Pyramid Arabs ; you can see the head of the
Sphinx as it looks from behind, very like the head of a
battered ginger-beer bottle ; and tourists as they look on
donkeys and camels in their Nile extravaganza clothes ; you
can see the same caricatures on camels and donkeys being
photographed with the Pyramids and the Sphinx in the
background, " to confirm their position as bona-fide travellers
and impress their poor relations " ; and you can see the road
to the Pyramids, that causeway running across the vast lake
of the inundation, with chasing donkey-boys in fluttering
blue night-shirts, and meek donkeys crawling in front of
lorries laden with black-veiled humpty-dumpties of women
the native form of omnibus.
As I stood on the terrace by Mehemet All's mosque,
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