CLIMBING THE GREAT PYRAMID The Great Pyramid has a base covering thirteen acres, and if Herodotus told the truth, it was during his lifetime about half as high again as the Washington Monument. The stones in it to-day would make eight hundred and fifty such monuments, yet fully one half of it, I should judge, has been carted away for buildings in Cairo. To¬ day it is over three hundred feet lower than Herodotus described it, and its sides do not measure more than seven hundred and fifty feet. It is an almost solid mass of stone, cut in mighty blocks, which are piled up in the shape of steps, growing smaller in size as they reach the top, and terminating in a flat platform large enough to build upon it a house thirty feet square. Such a house would be four hundred and eighty-two feet above the desert. It would command a view of the Nile valley for miles, and its back windows would look out upon the great, billowy plains of golden sand. This pyramid is built right in the desert, as are, indeed, all of the sixty pyramids of greater or less size found in different parts of Egypt. The south windows of the house would have a good view of the Pyramids of Sakkarah, which stand out in geometrical figures of blue upon the site of old Memphis, while on the front porch you could have as an ornament in your great yard be¬ low, the old stony-eyed Sphinx who sat with her paws stretched out before her in this same position when these mighty monuments were built, and who is one of the few females in the world who grows old without losing her beauty.

The Pyramids themselves are by no means young. The king who built the Great Pyramid for his tomb lived some three thousand odd years before Christ. Now, five thousand years later, we Americans climb to the top 81