to the imagination—luxuriant life developing in the most beautiful and brilliant display. And the Howadji turning, saw a few sand mounds, and a group of pyramids upon the horizon.

Nothing remains of Memphis but a colossus of Ramses, with his head deeply buried in the earthoverflowed yearly by the Nile, yet full of the same fascinating character-another representation of the old Egyptian type of beauty, shattered and submerged near a palm-shored lake. Past the lake we went, and over the broad belt of green that separates the palms from the desert, and then up the steep sand-slopes to the pyramids of Saccara.

Standing at the foot of the largest, and looking desertward, the Howadji beheld a landscape which is unlike all others. Upon the chaotic desert that tumbles eastward from an infinite horizon, jagged in sandy billows, that seem, in huge recoil, back falling upon themselves, at the edge of the green, rose the multitude of pyramids-twelve or more in number -near and far-dumb, inexplicable forms-like remains of a former creation that had endured, through strength, all intervening changes. Dimmest, and farthest of all, the great pyramids of Ghizeh, looming in the faint haze of noon, like the relics of fore-world art, defying curiosity and speculation. The solid mass of these structures weighed palpably

on the mind. A dead antediluvian silence settled around them, and seemed to benumb the faculties of the observer, unmooring him by its spell from the sentient sphere, to let him drift, aimless and without guide, into black death and darkness. It was a basilisk fascination that held the eye to the sight. The pyramid-studded desert was the strange verge and mingling point of the dead and living worlds. Yet they stood there, telling no tales, and the eye, at length released, slipped willingly far away over the palms, and beheld the glittering minarets of Cairo.

The mummy-merchants were here at Saccara, and offered endless treasure of amulet, and idol, and jewel, and from the great cat catacomb hard by, and the bird-tombs, mummied cats, and deified ibis done up in red pots, as the remains and memorials of mighty Memphis.

The Howadji returned over the same glad, green plain. They had prowled into a brace of dark, dismal tombs, and leaned against a pyramid-had seen the beautiful statue, with the body broken, and the face hidden-a sad symbol-and the pleasant palms and sunny green slopes under them. They returned through the most spacious and beautiful of palmgroves. Forgive their eyes and imaginations that they lingered long in those beautiful reaches, avenues, and vistas. It was as if the genius of palms

knew that his lovers were passing, and he unrolled and revealed his most perfect beauty as an adieu. It was a forest of the finest palms—a tropic in itself -through whose foliage the blue sky streamed, and amid which bright birds flew. They are the last palms that shall be planted on these pages, and the last that shall fade from memory. The young ones seem not to expand from saplings into trees, but to spring, Minerva-like, fully formed and foliaged, through the earth; for they bear all their widewaving crest of boughs when they first appear, and the trunk is so large that you fancy some gracious gnome, intent on adorning a world, is thrusting them by main force through the ground. As we reached the edge of this cheerful forest, we saw very plainly the white citadel of Cairo and its lofty minarets, high above the city.

We slipped down to Ghizeh, and the next morning donkeyed quietly to the pyramids. Except for the sake of the Sphinx, the Howadji would only ad vise the visit to the scientific and curious, and is the more willing to say so, because he knows that every traveller would not fail to go. But the pyramids were built for the distant eye, and their poetic grandeur and charm belong to distance. When your eye first strikes them, as you come up from Alexandria to Cairo, they stand vast, vague, rosy, and dis

tant, and are at once and entirely the Egypt of your dreams. The river winds and winds, and they seem to shift their places, to be now here, now there, now on the western shore, now on the eastern, until Egypt becomes, to your only too glowing fancy, a bright day and a pyramid.

Walk out beyond the village of Ghizeh at twilight then, and see them, not nearer than the breadth of the plain. They will seem to gather up the whole world into silence, and you will feel a pathos in their dumbness, quite below your tears. They have outlived speech, and are no more intelligible. Yet the freshness of youth still flushes in the sunset along their sides, and even these severe and awful forms have a beautiful bloom as of Hesperidean fruit, in your memory and imagination. The Howadji may well learn with pleasure that the Cairo Bedlam is abolished, when he feels his memory putting the pyramids as flowers in her garden. For they are that. They are beautiful no less than awful in remembrance.

But as you approach, they shrink and shrink; and when you stand at their bases, and cast your eye to the apex, they are but vast mountains of masonry, sloping upward to the sky. Beastly Bedoueen, importunate for endless bucksheesh, will pull you, breathless and angry, to the summit, and promise to

run up and over all possible pyramids, and for aught you know, throw you across to the peaks of the Saccara cousins. Only threats most terrible, and entirely impossible of performance, can restore the necessary silence. Express distinctly your determination to plunge every Bedoueen down the pyramid, when they have you dizzy, and breathless, and gasping on the sides, as you go up from layer to layer, like stairs-swear horribly in your gasping and rage, that you will only begin by throwing them down, but conclude by annihilating the whole tribe who haunt the pyramids, and you work a miracle. For the Bedoueen become as placidly silent as if your threats were feasible, and only mutter mildly, "Bucksheesh, Howadji," like retiring and innocent thunder.

There are, also, who explore the pyramids: who, from poetic or other motives, go into an utterly dark, hot, and noisome interior, see a broken sarcophagus, feel that they are encased in solid masonry of some rods from the air, hear the howls of Bedoueen, and smell their odors, and return faint, exhausted, smokeblackened, with their pockets picked, and their nerves direfully disturbed. Poet Harriet advises none but firmly-nerved ladies to venture, and the Howadji may add the same advice to all but firmly-nerved men. To such, the exploration of the