who is a remarkably
agreeable person, and has become very much one of our party. It was
arranged that we should dine at the _table d'hote_ at 7 P.M., start at
9, in carriages to the crossing of the Nile (about four miles), and on
donkeys from Gieja (about six miles). The Pasha's state-coach came to
the door at the appointed hour; we started, our own party, Mr. Bowlby,
Captain F., and M. de B., Gros' secretary. Gros himself, having twice
seen the Pyramids, declined going with us. The moon was very nearly
full, and but for the honour of the thing we might have dispensed with
the torch-bearers, who ran before the carriage and preceded the
donkeys, after we adopted that humbler mode of locomotion. Our row
across the river to the chant of the boatmen invoking the aid of a
sainted dervish, and our ride through the fertile borders of the Nile,
covered with crops and palm-trees, were very lovely, and, after about
an hour and a half from Cairo, we emerged upon the Desert. The
Pyramids seemed then almost within reach of our outstretched arms, but
lo! they were in fact some four miles distant. We kept moving on at a
sort of ambling walk; and the first sign of our near approach was the
appearance of a crowd of Arabs who poured out of a village to offer us
their aid in various ways. We had been told before we started, that a
party who had visited the Pyramids the night before had been a good
deal victimised by these Arabs, who, alas! in these degenerate days,
have no other mode of indulging their predatory propensities than by
exacting the greatest possible amount of 'backshish' from travellers
who visit the Pyramids. We pushed on over the heaps of sand and
_debris_, or probably covered-up tombs, which surround the base of the
Pyramids, when we suddenly came in face of the most remarkable object
on which my eye ever lighted. Somehow or other I had not thought of
the Sphinx till I saw her before me. There she was in all her imposing
magnitude, crouched on the margin of the Desert, looking over the
fertile valley of the Nile, and her gaze fixed on the East as if in
earnest expectation of the sun-rising. And such a gaze! The mystical
light and deep shadows cast by the moon, gave to it an intensity which
I cannot attempt to describe. To me it seemed a look, earnest,
searching, but unsatisfied. For a long t