oast.

Fragments the deluge of old Time has left
Behind in its subsidence--long long walls
Of cities of their very names bereft,--
Lone columns, remnants of majestic halls,
Rich traceried chambers, where the night-dew falls,--
All have I seen with feelings due, I trow,
Yet not with such as these memorials
Of the great unremembered, that can show
The mass and shape they wore four thousand years ago.

The Egyptian idea of a pyramid was that of a structure on a square base,
with four inclining sides, each one of which should be an equilateral
triangle, all meeting in a point at the top. The structure might be
solid, and in that case might be either of hewn stone throughout, or
consist of a mass of rubble merely held together by an external casing
of stone; or it might contain chambers and passages, in which case the
employment of rubble was scarcely possible. It has been demonstrated by
actual excavation, that all the _great_ pyramids of Egypt were of the
latter character that they were built for the express purpose of
containing chambers and passages, and of preserving those chambers and
passages intact. They required, therefore, to be, and in most cases are,
of a good construction throughout.

There are from sixty to seventy pyramids in Egypt, chiefly in the
neighbourhood of Memphis. Some of them are nearly perfect, some more or
less in ruins, but most of them still preserving their ancient shape,
when seen from afar. Two of them greatly exceed all the others in their
dimensions, and are appropriately designated as "the Great Pyramid" and
"the Second Pyramid." A third in their immediate vicinity is of very
inferior size, and scarcely deserves the pre-eminence which has been
conceded to it by the designation of "the Third Pyramid."

Still, the three seem, all of them, to deserve description, and to
challenge a place in "the story of Egypt," which has never yet been told
without some account of the marvels of each of them. The smallest of the
three was a square of three hundred and fifty-four feet each way, and
had a height of two hundred and eighteen feet. It covered an area of two
acres, three roods, and twenty-one poles, or about that of an ordinary
London square. The cubic contents amounted to above nine million feet of
solid masonry, and are calculated to have weighed 702,460 tons. The
height was not very impressive. Two hundred and twenty feet is an
al