hey are! How natural!" And this
long familiarity makes one shrink from arranging phrases about them.

One thing, however, can be said: when we are in actual fact under them,
when we can touch them, our easy acquaintance vanishes, and we suddenly
perceive that we have never comprehended them in the least. The strange
geometrical walls effect a spiritual change in us; they free us from
ourselves for a moment, and unconsciously we look back across the past
to which they belong, and into the future, of which they are a part
much more than we are, as unmindful of our own little cares and
occupations, and even our own small lives, as though we had never been
chained to them. It is but a fleeting second, perhaps, that this mental
emancipation lasts, but it is a second worth having!

One drives to the pyramids in an hour, over a macadamized road. The
perennial stories about trouble with the Bedouins belong to the past.
Soldiers and policemen guard the sands as they guard the Cairo streets,
and the proffer of false antiquities is not more pressing, perhaps, than
the demands of the beggars in town. These three pyramids of Gizeh are
those we think of before we have visited Egypt. But there are others;
including the small ones and those which are ruined, seventy have been
counted in twenty-five miles from Cairo to Meydoom, and pyramids are to
be seen in other parts of Egypt. The stories concerning Gizeh and the
travellers who, from Herodotus down, have visited the colossal tombs,
are innumerable. I do not know why the one about Lepsius should seem to
me amusing. This learned man and his party, who were sent to Egypt by
King Frederick William of Prussia in 1842, celebrated that king's
birthday by singing in chorus the Prussian national anthem in the centre
of Cheops. The Bedouins in attendance reported outside that they had
"prayed all together a loud general prayer."

In connection with the pyramids, the English may be said to have devoted
themselves principally to measurements. The genius of the French, which
is ever that of expression, has invented the one great sentence about
them. So far, the Americans have done nothing by which to distinguish
themselves; but their time will come, perhaps. One fancies that Edison
will have something to do with it. In the meanwhile modernity is already
there. There is a hotel at the foot of Cheops, and one hardly knows
whether to laugh or to cry when one sees lawn-tennis going on there
daily.